Smuggling gangs with suspected Russian links tried to sell nuclear material to jihadists belong to Islamic State (IS) group, news agency AP reported.
Citing Moldovan sources familiar with the joint investigation launched by the country’s security agencies and the American FBI, the news agency reported that four attempts in the past five years by the gangs that sought to sell radioactive material to Middle Eastern extremists had been interrupted.
The latest known case came in February this year, when a smuggler offered a huge cache of deadly cesium — enough to contaminate several city blocks — and specifically sought a buyer from Isis.
The smuggler, one Valentin Grossu, offered the supply of cesium to what he thought was an IS representative in exchange for €2.5m, the investigation revealed. The representative was in fact an informant.
“You can make a dirty bomb (colloquial term for nuclear bomb), which would be perfect for the Islamic State,” the smuggler said in a meeting at a nightclub in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau. The sting operation ended with Grossu in jail. The investigation also uncovered an attempt to sell bomb–grade uranium to a eral buyer from the Middle East.
In wiretaps, videotaped arrests, photographs of bomb-grade material, documents and interviews of the investigation, the news agency found that smugglers are explicitly targeting buyers who are enemies of the West.
But according to the inside sources of the investigation team, AP reported that the team had also suffered from their fair share of bad luck–kingpins got away, and those arrested evaded long prison sentences, sometimes quickly returning to nuclear smuggling.
For strategic reasons, in most of the operations arrests were made after samples of nuclear material had been obtained rather than the larger quantities. That means that if smugglers did have access to the bulk of material they offered, it still remains in criminal hands.
The repeated attempts to peddle radioactive materials signal that a thriving nuclear black market has emerged in an impoverished corner of Eastern Europe. Moldova, which borders Romania, is a former Soviet republic.
The FBI and the White House declined to comment on the matter. The US State Department would not comment on the specifics of the cases.