Spiegel said the men first came to Munich from Moscow by train on July 9 with four grams of weapons-grade plutonium, and after a week of negotiations in their hotel room, sold it to an undercover agent of the German intelligence service. The dealers demanded $70,000 per gram of plutonium, a total of $230 million. After selling the small sample to investigators July 25, they returned to Moscow to obtain the rest.
8/20/94 - German authorities said they seized about two pounds of lithium-6, used in the making of hydrogen bombs, when they confiscated a consignment of contraband plutonium earlier this month. In the most spectacular of three seizures of plutonium in the last four months, police in Munich earlier this month caught couriers who flew in from Moscow with 10.5 ounces of the highly toxic and radioactive material.
A spokesman for the Bavarian regional criminal investigation department in Munich said laboratory tests showed that another vessel brought in by the couriers contained lithium-6, a non-radioactive substance used to make hydrogen bombs. He said the smugglers earlier gave a sample of lithium-6 to police agents setting up the deal, and that a report in the news weekly Spiegel putting the total amount of smuggled lithium-6 at around two pounds was broadly accurate.
The two ex-soldiers were detained by Ukrainian police and their containers of suspected uranium-235 were seized and are undergoing analysis. The 13 pounds (6 kilograms) of radioactive material was in the form of cylindrical pellets kept in three glass jars, according to the Ukrainian Interior Ministry.
Spokesman Oleksander Zarubytsky said the material was being analyzed to determine its composition and its source, though the two men reportedly told authorities they obtained the pellets in Russia. Although the men in custody formerly served in the Russian army, they are now Ukrainian citizens. The men were arrested earlier in the month, but the case was only made public this week.
The former soldiers intended to sell the material, which the Kiev newspaper Kievsky Vedomosti said was worth $250,000 per kilogram. The West has voiced fears about nuclear materials falling into the hands of terrorists. "This is the second such seizure this year," said Col. Mykhailo Sadovyi of Ukraine's Interior Ministry. "In January we detained three people who wanted to sell uranium-235, which is weapons-grade, and uranium-238." Initial indications are that the material seized in the latest case may be uranium-235 and -238. Later - Kiev Institute for Naval Research found it to be 20 percent enriched.
It was the first time nuclear-related materials had been found on a member of the religious sect, which police suspect made the gas that killed 11 people and injured 5,000 on Tokyo subways on March 20. The nuclear document belonged to a large heavy machinery company and was marked "internal use only," the paper said. It was highly specialised and referred to the use of lasers, which experts say might in future be used to enrich uranium.
The man in possession of the document was a member of the sect's Science and Technology Agency. He had been arrested for obstructing police work after he fled from cult premises on March 21, the day after the subway attacks, and the day before the first police raid. They also found in his car aluminium alloy vaporizers of the same type found at Kasumigaseki station, one target of the gas attacks.
Another newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, said police had found evidence the sect was researching biological weapons. They uncovered around 300 biochemistry books as well as incubators and electron microscopes, needed to produce weapons bacteria, at sect facilities in Kamikuishiki, west of Tokyo.
Some of the books explained how to culture botulinum, a bacterium that produces a toxin on the surface of food that kills a person who eats it. So far large quantities of equipment and chemicals have been found at the sect's compounds, including all the ingredients of sarin, the nerve gas unleashed on the subway.
Customs officials in Cyprus have seized two tonnes of zirconium, a material used in nuclear reactors, that were believed to be bound for Iraq. Government spokesman Yiannakis Cassoulides told journalists six boxes of zirconium were intercepted by customs authorities.
Five tonnes of zirconium were seized in New York in what a U.S. customs official said was a sting operation by U.S. agents posing as representatives of the Iraqi government. He said it was the largest seizure of nuclear-related material by the United States.
"The cargo is being kept at the customs warehouse of Larnaca airport," Cassoulides said. "Nobody has come forward to clear it from customs."
The cargo arrived on a commercial flight from Amsterdam, and according to the bill of lading, the recipient is an offshore company based in Limassol. Cassoulides said although the company appears to be the final recipient in documents there were suspicions its final destination was Iraq.
Three Greeks were arrested in New York on Thursday on suspicion of attempting to ship the zirconium to Iraq via Cyprus. A Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official said the zirconium had come from Ukraine.
Zirconium is almost exclusively used in nuclear reactors as a cladding, or covering, for nuclear fuel in a reactor core. It can also be ground into a fine powder for use in military explosives and propellants.
In what officials described as the federal government's largest seizure of nuclear reactor-grade material from the black market, three men were arrested today for allegedly attempting to ship it in violation of the U.S. trade embargo against Iraq.
"What we speak of is the largest seizure of nuclear-related commodities by the U.S. government," Robert Van Etten, special agent of the Customs Service's New York office, told a news conference.
He said the government believed the zirconium was stolen from the strategic reserves of the former Soviet Union and sent to the United States via Germany. Zirconium is a metallic element similar to titanium that is almost exclusively used in nuclear reactors as cladding, or covering, for nuclear fuel in a reactor core. It also can be ground into a fine powder for use in military explosives and propellants.
James Kallstrom of the FBI told the same news conference, where an 80-pound zirconium ingot was displayed in a wooden crate, that the importance of the seizure could not be overstated. "That an ordinary warehouse in Woodside, Queens, could be used as a transshipment point for five tons of nuclear-grade zirconium, originating in Ukraine and destined for Iraq, should serve as a wake-up call as to the ease with which such material is available," he said.
The three suspects, all New York residents, were identified as Demetrios Demetrios, owner of Interglobal Manufacturing Enterprises with offices in Greece, Moscow and New York; Renos Kourtides; and Constantin Zahariadis. They were arrested on export conspiracy charges that carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Officials said five tons of the zirconium was stored in a warehouse in the New York City borough of Queens. The remaining two tons was sent by the men to Cyprus, apparently for shipment to Iraq.
In August 1990, President George Bush signed the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations, which prohibit all trade with Iraq except for humanitarian items.
Here is a country-by-country look at who has acquired nuclear weapons or might acquire them in the next few years.
In Germany, a federal police report said cases of nuclear crime went from 99 in 1992 to 123 in 1993 and totaled 54 in the first half of 1994.
In 1993, there were two failed attempts in Germany at nuclear blackmail involving threats to release radioactivity and explode a bomb, New Scientist, (British publication) reported in its current issue.
About 500 people have been arrested in Germany in the last year as alleged nuclear criminals, most of them foreigners. They include Russians, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks according to Hans-Ludwig Zachert, chief of the national police.
Almost all the 276 nuclear smuggling crimes recorded in Germany since 1992 have been sting operations involving undercover agents, police and researchers said.