Thread: 3 Arrested in Radioactive Sale Bid

3 Arrested in Radioactive Sale Bid

By WILLIAM J. KOLE – 2 hours ago

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) — Police in Slovakia and Hungary arrested three people and seized 2.2 pounds of an unspecified but "dangerous" radioactive material the suspects were trying to sell for $1 million, Slovak authorities said Wednesday.

The Czech news agency CTK, citing unconfirmed reports, said the material seized by authorities was enriched uranium. Slovak police spokesman Martin Korch declined to comment on the report, saying specialists were examining what he described only as "dangerous radioactive material."

Two of the suspects were arrested in eastern Slovakia, and the third was arrested in Hungary, Korch said. The suspects were not identified.

Eastern Slovakia's border with Ukraine is the European Union's easternmost frontier, and authorities have spent millions tightening security in the past few years, fearing terrorists or organized crime syndicates could smuggle weapons, explosives and other contraband into the EU.

Slovak and Hungarian police worked together on the case for several months, Korch said. He would not say how long the suspects were under surveillance, or detail how they were arrested and to whom they were trying to sell the material.

Hungary's National Bureau of Investigation had no comment Wednesday.

Erich Tomas, a spokesman for the Slovak Interior Ministry, said he had no information about the case. The U.S. Embassy in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, also had no immediate comment.

There have been concerns that Eastern Europe could be a source of radioactive material for a so-called "dirty bomb," which would use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive debris. Experts say such a weapon would frighten far more people than it would harm.

In 2003, police in the Czech Republic, which borders Slovakia, arrested two Slovaks in a sting operation in the city of Brno after they allegedly sold undercover officers bars of low-enriched uranium for $715,000.

Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said the U.N. nuclear watchdog would be following up on the case.

"It will be important to determine whether the material in question is nuclear," Fleming said. Such incidents are tracked in an IAEA database, she said.

The IAEA reported in August that there were more than 250 reported thefts or losses of nuclear material around the world in 2006, an increase of about 200 percent from 2002.

Concerns about nuclear smuggling have generally been focused on Russia and countries of the former Soviet Union, where security at nuclear-related industries deteriorated after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The U.S.-based Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization dedicated to reducing the global threat from nuclear weapons, said in a report last year that Russia remains the prime country of concern for contraband nuclear material.

In 2006, Georgian agents working with CIA officials set up a sting that led to the arrest of a Russian citizen who tried to sell a small amount of weapons-grade uranium that he had in a plastic bag in his jacket pocket.

In 1997, two men who officials said planned to smuggle 11 pounds of enriched uranium to Pakistan or China were arrested in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. That uranium reportedly had been stolen from a plant in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.

"There was great concern after the demise of the Soviet Union that this sort of thing was going to be on the increase because obviously there were huge amounts of nuclear materials and weapons," said Kate Hudson, chairwoman of Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. "There was great concern about a black market developing."

But that has not really happened, Hudson said.

"The kind of massive problem that had been envisioned hasn't come to fruition," she said.