ISLAMABAD: Pakistan cricket legend Imran Khan on Thursday offered the country's disgraced nuclear hero, Abdul Qadeer Khan, treatment at his specialised cancer hospital.   
 
"Dr AQ Khan must be immediately shifted to Shaukat Khanum Hospital, the only place in the country where specialised cancer treatment is available," Khan said on the private Geo television network.
 
"I want to convey this message to the nation through this programme," the cricketer-turned politician said, adding that any delay in treatment could be dangerous for AQ Khan, who is suffering from prostate cancer.   
 
"Whatever allegations Qadeer Khan is facing, he is our hero," he said.
 
The government on Tuesday made the 70-year-old Khan's condition public, but said the disease was not at an advanced stage.   
 
Khan -- who is at the centre of an international nuclear proliferation scandal involving North Korea, Libya and Iran -- is revered as a hero in Pakistan as the father of the Islamic world's first atomic bomb.
 
In January 2004, he made a televised confession in which he admitted passing nuclear secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea, placing him in the thick of a global atomic black market.   
 
President Pervez Musharraf pardoned him the following month. But Khan has since lived under virtual house arrest in a leafy diplomatic sector in Islamabad and makes no public appearances.
 
Imran Khan established a hospital specialising in the treatment of cancer in the eastern city of Lahore in 1994 in memory of his mother Shaukat Khanum.
 
"It would be a great honour for me and our hospital to treat Dr AQ Khan," the former all-rounder said.
 
Information Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani, who appeared on the Geo programme with Khan, said the government had appointed a medical team to provide the scientist with the best possible treatment.
 
"The government would follow the recommendations of the doctors' team," Durrani said.
 
"We all are praying for his early recovery," he said Wednesday when he visited Khan at his residence.
 
Musharraf refuses to let foreign investigators meet Khan, saying that Pakistan was able to interrogate him without the assistance of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency or other world organizations.