'Sausage trader' caught selling weapons grade Uranium

[Tennyson]

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.

\'Sausage trader\' caught selling weapons grade uranium - 26 Jan 2007 - World