BRATISLAVA (AFP) — Hungarian and Slovak police seized enriched uranium that could be used in a "dirty bomb" when they arrested three traffickers in a joint operation, officials said Thursday.
"According to preliminary information, the material could have been used to make a so-called dirty bomb," Slovak deputy police president Michal Kopcik told journalists in Bratislava.
The traffickers wanted 1.6 million dollars for the 481.4 grammes of material, Kopcik said. It contained uranium-235, the type used in nuclear reactors and nuclear warheads, and the naturally occurring uranium-238.
"The radioactive uranium was even more dangerous because it was in powder form," Kopcik explained.
The arrests followed an international operation lasting several months.
Two suspects were detained on Wednesday on the Slovakian side of the border and one in Hungary, the police chief said. One was a 40-year-old Ukrainian, another a 49-year-old Hungarian living in Ukraine and the third a 51-year-old Hungarian.
Police said the uranium had come from the former Soviet Union but did not give further details.
The radioactive material was due to be sold for 3,500 dollars a gramme, he added, giving a total price of about 1.6 million dollars (one million euros).
UN nuclear watchdog, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has called for details of the latest in a series of cases involving the sale of radioactive material in Slovakia and the neighbouring Czech Republic.
In 2004, two former Slovak army officers were found guilty by a Czech court of attempting to sell uranium. The two were arrested outside Brno in November 2003 after they tried to sell three kilogrammes (6.5 pounds) of the substance.
The IAEA has regularly expressed concern about illegal trade in uranium in Eastern Europe and other parts of the former Soviet Union and highlighted the problem of missing material.
The IAEA's Illicit Trafficking Database received reports in 2006 of 252 incidents of trafficking and illegal activities involving radioactive and nuclear material, of which 150 occurred that year and 102 in 2005.
More than half of last year's cases involved the theft, loss or misrouting of material with the goods still missing in around 73 percent of cases, it added.
In September, German engineer Gerhard Wisser, allegedly part of a network trafficking nuclear materials, was handed an 18-year prison sentence in South Africa.
Last year, two South Koreans were arrested in Beijing, suspected of seeking to sell almost a kilogram of enriched uranium.
In February 2006, a Russian, Oleg Khiltsagov, was arrested in Georgia. He was accused of trying to sell 100 grammes of 90-percent enriched uranium for a million dollars to a Georgian policeman posing an an Islamist militant.
He was sentenced to eight years in prison in January 2007.
A "dirty bomb" is not a nuclear bomb. It uses conventional explosives to disgorge radioactive material over a wide area, unleashing panic and making the area unusable.
Uranium exists naturally as an ore. To make it usable for civilian or military use, scientists have to separate out two of its isotopes, uranium-238 and uranium-235.
Uranium-235 is the fissile isotope used in civilian and military applications.
Different activities need different levels of enrichment. For nuclear power, enrichment -- the proportion of uranium-235 -- is around three percent.
For bombs, where an uncontrolled chain reaction is needed, enrichment can go as high as 95 percent, although some estimates say 20 percent is enough to build a crude device.
Slovak police said they first got information in the southern city of Filakovo in August that radioactive material from Hungary was being offered for sale.
Following unconfirmed reports that radioactive material was buried near the northern Hungarian town of Nagyborzsony, the breakthrough came in October when one seller came to Slovakia with a radioactive sample.
The Slovak man was arrested in the neighbouring Czech Republic in mid-October, although instead of uranium police only found slightly radioactive mercury.
Czech police said on October 25 that after a six-month investigation they had charged four foreign men with taking part in a scam to sell purported radioactive material.
The trio arrested by Slovak police on Wednesday could face jail sentences of up to 15 years if found guilty, according to local media reports.
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