WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 2003
Dirty bomb material up for grabs in S-E Asia
MICHAEL SHERIDAN
THE SUNDAY TIMES
BANGKOK: An international hunt is under way for up to 130 lb of radioactive material - suitable for use in a terrorist "dirty bomb" - that brokers are trying to sell to the highest bidder in southeast Asia.
Police and intelligence officials from Thailand and several western powers are helping to track down the caesium-137, which is said to be stored in neighbouring Laos.
The search follows the arrest in Bangkok on June 13 of a Thai headmaster, Narong Penanam, 44, who tried to sell 62 lb of the material for pounds 150,000 to undercover Thai police working with American agents. Western officials and nuclear experts were shocked at the amount seized.
The caesium, stored in metal casing, is said to have come from the former Soviet republic of Latvia. It formed part of a cache of 194 lb smuggled out of the collapsing Soviet empire to Laos, whose communist rulers were cold war allies of the Kremlin.
A Thai intelligence informant has reportedly said that the remaining 130 lb are at a military camp 16 miles from the Lao capital, Vientiane. Diplomats said "strong representations" were being made to the Lao government.
Landlocked, poor and secretive, Laos is a nexus for drug trafficking. Its rulers are not suspected of sympathy for terrorism but have a reputation for corruption. "This is criminal opportunism, not a sinister plot," said a western diplomat.
Thai police and western sources said there was no evidence to link Narong to Islamic militants or terrorism.
Suspicions are growing among western officials that corrupt military officers in Thailand and Laos have been connected with several efforts to sell the caesium. Chanak Charoenruk, an air marshal in the Royal Thai Air Force who died in 2001, took a sample of the caesium to the atomic energy agency for testing three years ago.
"My husband was asked by an intermediary to check this substance and he took it for testing," said his widow.
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