Pakistan’s ISPR DG is son of nuclear scientist linked to Osama, who believed djinns could solve energy crisis

Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the director general of Pakistan's Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR),
is the son of Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood—a nuclear engineer who was designated as a global terrorist by the UN and US in 2001 for alleged ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, including links to a safe house in Kabul.

ISPR is the media and public relations wing of the Pakistani armed forces.

Sharif has been regularly leading media briefings in Pakistan amid rising tensions with India, even going so far as to threaten to "finish" what the Indian Army allegedly started.

Pakistan army chief General Asim Munir had appointed Sharif has the head of ISPR in 2022 after assuming charge.

Father gave nuclear info to Osama

Sharif's father Bashiruddin reportedly met Osama bin Laden and provided him information about the infrastructure needed for a nuclear weapons programme and the effects of nuclear weapons, the United Nations had said.

Bashiruddin, who is a nuclear scientist, also allegedly raised funds for a fundamentalist group called Ummah Tameer-e-Nau.

After he was arrested in 2001, Bashiruddin admitted that he met Osama but denied sharing any nuclear secrets with him. He claimed that he just discussed raising funds for a technical college in Afghanistan.

Later, Pakistan's ISI said that he did not have enough technical knowledge to pass on information about nuclear weapons to Osama. This led to his release.

An old report in The Print said that Sharif was once questioned by ISI about the pro-Jihadi activities of his father. However, he was later cleared of any suspicion.

The Print report also said that Sharif's father wrote several books with themes of apocalypse and held rather unconventional views on physics. He even said in one of his books that energy included “the djinns, created out of fire (the plasma of hot gases)”. He even proposed that djinns could be tapped to solve the energy crisis.

In an old article from 2001, the New York Times had described Bashiruddin as a "fundamentalist Muslim with unorthodox scientific views", quoting his fellow scientists.

A journalist once reported that Bashiruddin's colleagues at the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission were “half-amused and half-horrified” by his bizarre theories—such as his obsession with sunspots supposedly triggering the French and Russian Revolutions, World War II, and various anticolonial uprisings.

A US intelligence officer told Sanger that Bashiruddin knew what he was doing but was also "completely out of his mind.”