‘Pakistan may give downed US chopper to China’

Members of the United States Congress are now being guarded against Islamabad for its historically strong ties to Beijing, following the revelation that Osama bin Laden had been hiding in Pakistan for years, and one senior congressman highlighted the Pakistan-China relationship as a key reason to distrust the country, US magazine Foreign Policy said in a report on Tuesday.
According to the report, a “Dear Colleague” letter sent to all lawmakers from the office of Representative Dana Rohrabacher, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, said that in 1998 Pakistan’s military and intelligence services had “facilitated the transfer to Communist China” of a Taliban recovered unexploded American Tomahawk cruise missile, which “we fired in an attempt to kill Osama bin Laden and members of al Qaeda.”
The Chinese, said the letter, had reverse-engineered the missile and dissected its components allowing them to learn “its vulnerabilities and defeat its capabilities”. According to the report, the title of Rohrabacher’s letter read “Is Pakistan Planning to Give Our Secret Special Forces Helicopter to Communist China?” Rohrabacher demanded that Pakistan immediately return the debris to “avoid compromising American secrets”, said the report.
“If this is not done now it is probable, given Pakistan’s history, that the debris will find its way into the hands of the Communist Chinese military that is buying, building, and stealing the necessary military technology to challenge the United States,” the letter stated.
The letter came at a particularly sensitive time, as over 100 Chinese officials were in Washington on Tuesday for the first day of the US-China Security and Economic Dialogue, hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the report said.