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Enriched uranium seized at border Two Hungarians and a Ukrainian have been arrested for allegedly trying to sell half a kilogram of enriched uranium that could have been used in a ‘dirty bomb’, Slovak police said last Thursday. “This uranium is all the more dangerous because it is powdered,” CTK news agency reported Slovak deputy police chief Michal Kopcik as saying. “According to the first findings, it could have been used for a production of a dirty bomb and terrorist attacks of various kinds.” Sellers caught, buyers not The Slovak organised crime unit, working in conjunction with Hungarian police, arrested the three men at the eastern Pribenik-Lácacséke border crossing between Hungary and Slovakia last Wednesday. The men allegedly planned to sell 481.4 grams of uranium, which Slovak police said originated in the former Soviet Union, for USD 3,500 dollars per gram. The prospective buyers of the radioactive material were not arrested, however. The seizure was made before the transaction took place. Police have not said who the buyers were. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna declined to officially comment on the case, saying it was still a domestic criminal investigation and that everything around the case was purely conjecture. According to IAEA officials, there are huge amounts of low-grade radioactive material floating around in the region. The Slovak authorities have not yet disclosed how enriched the uranium was, but the kind of money allegedly being demanded for the material has raised suspicions that it is relatively high grade. Uranium must be enriched to contain at least 85% of the U235 isotope in order to be weapons grade. There has long been concern about smuggling from the former Soviet Union, which saw security at nuclear facilities crumble following the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. This is not the first time such material has been seized in the region. Police arrested two men in the Czech Republic in 2003 for allegedly selling three kilograms of low-enriched uranium to undercover officers for almost one million dollars.
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