Epress.am News from Armenia
Highly enriched uranium (HEU) was smuggled from Armenia to Georgia in a lead-lined cigarette packet in March. Two men involved in transporting the substance were arrested in April, report various British media.
But the details of the operation were not known until Sunday when it was disclosed that two Armenian nationals — Sumbat Tonoyan, 63, a former dairy factory owner, and Hrant Ohanyan, 59, a retired nuclear physicist from Yerevan Physics Institute — were implicated in the smuggling case. Both men have pleaded guilty.
Prosecutors said the pair had smuggled 18 grams of HEU on March 11, 2010, by train from the Armenian capital of Yerevan to the Georgian capital of 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.
They were on the way to sell their precious sample to a man of whom they knew nothing other than that he was probably a Muslim and claimed to represent “very serious people” willing to pay up to $50,000 a gram, reports The Guardian. If the sale went to plan, the two smugglers had arranged to go back to their Armenian supplier for more.
The smugglers thought they were dealing with an Islamist extremist group. In fact, they were set up by the Georgian secret service.
The trial, which is being held in camera, has underlined how little about the illicit trade in nuclear smuggling is known.
Further, the investigation has highlighted the difficulty of stopping nuclear smuggling in the region. Radiation detectors on the Georgia-Armenia border failed to identify the substance.