LONDON, Feb 24: Ms Benazir Bhutto said on Tuesday that she was approached several times when she was prime minister of Pakistan by military officials and scientists seeking permission to export nuclear technology, but turned down their requests.

In an interview with the Financial Times newspaper, Ms Bhutto, who served two terms from 1988-90 and 1993-1996 and is the Pakistan People's Party Chairperson, said she and senior military officers had agreed on a bar on the export of nuclear technology in December 1988.

This, however, did not prevent senior military officials and scientists persisting with the idea and later in her first term broaching the subject of raising money by selling nuclear know-how, she said.

"It certainly was their belief that they could earn tons of money if they did this," Ms Bhutto said. "It was something that I was disabusing them of, that they could not get it. If they chose to sell it, only three countries would buy it, because it wasn't like McDonald's hamburgers that would have a big consumer market," she said.

She said the three countries she was referring to were Iran, Iraq and Libya and that she had told officials it would sell for no more than 100 million dollars per country, not enough to help Pakistan's economy.

Ms Bhutto's comments came two days after she said that the architect of the country's atomic bomb, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, was "covering up" for President Pervez Musharraf by publicly confessing to transferring nuclear technology to other countries.

President Musharraf on Feb 4 pardoned Dr Khan, considered a national hero in Pakistan for guiding the programme which built the country's nuclear bomb, after the scientist confessed to giving nuclear information to groups working for Iran, Libya and North Korea.

But President Musharraf, who was head of Pakistan Army before seizing power in a bloodless coup in 1999, has insisted that Dr Khan acted without the government's or the military's knowledge. Ms Bhutto, an arch-foe of President Musharraf, has lived in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai since 1998. -AFP