Tajiks arrested with stolen uranium

Numerous cases of nuclear theft occur in ex-Soviet republics

Authorities in Tajikistan have arrested four men caught with two kilos of stolen uranium.

A spokesman for the Tajik security ministry said the group was arrested in the northern city of Chkalovsk.

The reports have raised fears that the stolen material might be used to build a nuclear device or a 'dirty bomb'

They refused to say where they obtained the uranium or what they were planning to do with it.

But laboratory tests showed it to have been stolen from the Vostokkredmet metal plant in the town of Taboshar, near Chkalovsk.

An official investigation is under way.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, numerous incidents involving the theft of radioactive materials have been reported in former Soviet republics.

Officials have said that all such thefts involved low-concentration substances in small quantities unfit for making nuclear weapons.

But the incidents have raised fears that the stolen material might be used to build a crude nuclear device or a "dirty bomb".

Radiation released

A "dirty bomb" is made by wrapping radioactive material such as spent nuclear fuel rods around ordinary high explosives, then detonating the device.

The package could be used in a car bombing or a similar attack.

Damage is not caused so much by the explosion, but by the radiation released into the atmosphere.

Fuel rods could be used to make dirty bombs

That could cause deaths, cancers and other health problems over many years, as happened after the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine.

Concerns over the security of former Soviet biological weapons have also been voiced.

On Tuesday, a United States senator called for the clean up of a former testing facility in Uzbekistan.

Tonnes of biological weapons lie buried on an island in the Aral Sea.

Senator Bill Nelson said action must be taken to prevent lethal bacteria falling into the hands of terrorists.