Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, announced in April that his country, a staunch US ally, had uncovered and foiled a plot to sell highly enriched uranium (HEU) to an Islamist extremist group. But the details of the operation were not known until Sunday when it was disclosed that two Armenian nationals, businessman Sumbat Tonoyan and physicist Hrant Ohanyan, were implicated in the smuggling case. Both men have pleaded guilty.
Prosecutors said they had smuggled 18 grams of HEU by train from the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, to the capital of Georgia, Tbilisi, in a lead-lined cigarette box. Such a quantity was nowhere near enough to make a nuclear bomb but was meant as a “taster sample” with more HEU available if the buyer was satisfied.
The smugglers thought they were dealing with an Islamist extremist group.
In fact, they were set up by the Georgian secret service.
It is unclear how much stolen nuclear material is already in circulation and how much may have already been purchased by extremist groups.
The HEU intercepted was 89.4 per cent enriched and therefore usable in a nuclear warhead.
There is some evidence that the consignment, together with two others before it, was sourced from a nuclear fuel plant in Novosibirsk in Siberia, Russia.
