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MOSCOW - An international nuclear smuggling scandal erupted yesterday after it was revealed that a Russian man has been caught selling weapons-grade uranium on the open market that could easily be used in a small nuclear bomb.
The man, named as 50 year-old Oleg Khinsagov, was arrested in the course of a 'sting' operation orchestrated by the FBI and the Georgian secret service last year though details only became public yesterday.
The scandal raises fresh question about the security of nuclear materials on the territory of the former Soviet Union and is embarrassing for the Kremlin that has repeatedly claimed to have successfully broken the illicit trade in nuclear components.
Mr Khinsagov, who has since been sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison, was arrested in Georgia with 100 grams of highly enriched weapons grade uranium casually wrapped in a plastic bag in his jacket pocket.
He believed he had found a buyer willing to pay him US$1million ($1.4 million) for the nuclear fuel, material that was probably stolen from a military or research facility somewhere within the former USSR.
American nuclear experts have claimed that the uranium originated within Russia itself though Russian scientists have claimed it is "impossible" to determine its origin.
The buyer was in fact an undercover Georgian agent who told Mr Khinsaghov that he was a Muslim working for "a serious organisation."
For Mr Khinsagov, ostensibly a trader specialising in fish and sausages, that was good enough and he had boasted that the 100 grams was merely a 'sample.' Back at his flat in the southern Russian region of North Ossetia, he claimed to have a further four kilos of uranium.
Such an amount would have been enough to build a small nuclear bomb: the blast that laid waste to the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 contained around 50 kilos of a similar grade of uranium.
Three Georgian accomplices were arrested and sentenced to up to five years in jail.
Non-proliferation experts have labelled the incident as one of the most serious in recent years.
"Given the serious consequences of the detonation of an improvised nuclear explosive device, even small number of incidents involving HEU [highly enriched uranium] or plutonium are of very high concern," said Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The Georgian interior minister, Ivane Merabishvili, said the case illustrated the grave risk posed by nuclear trafficking in an age of international terrorism.
The biggest danger, he said, were people "in Russia and Georgia and everywhere else, even in America, who will sell this radioactive material" for millions of dollars.
Russia has confirmed the outline details of the case but has suggested that Georgia's decision to disclose its sensational details now has more to do with politics that a genuine concern for nuclear non-proliferation.
The two countries are locked in a mutually damaging row aggravated by the fact that Georgia is run by a US-educated pro-Western President, Mikhail Saakashvili, who is perceived to be anti-Russian.
Both countries have accused one another of not doing enough to get to the bottom of the high-profile nuclear smuggling case.
A Russian government source told news agency Interfax that: "The appearance of this information only now, after quite a long time has passed, and also the appearance of information, frankly speaking, that somewhat distorts the situation...obviously cannot be regarded as a step aimed at normalising Russian-Georgian relations."
However laboratories in both the United States and Russia have confirmed that the substance seized was indeed highly enriched weapons-grade uranium and that it was processed around ten years ago.
According to researchers at Stanford University, around 40 kilos of uranium and plutonium was smuggled out of research and military facilities in the former Soviet Union in the last decade.
The Kremlin begs to differ though: it claims that the majority of uranium stolen was not weapons-grade and that most of it has been tracked down and returned to its rightful place.
- INDEPENDENT
