A police raid on Islamic militants uncovers uranium and dirty bomb-making instructions
Islamic extremists in Bangladesh
may be trying to make a radioactive "dirty" bomb. On May 30, Bangladeshi
police arrested four suspected members of a militant Islamic group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen,
at a house in the northern village of Puiya. Officers also seized a football-size
package with markings indicating it contained a crude form of uranium manufactured
in Kazakhstan. Subsequent tests last week at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy
Commission in Dhaka confirmed the 225-gram ball is uranium oxide, enough
to make a weapon capable of dispersing radiation across a wide area if
strapped to conventional explosives. A scientist at the commission told
TIME that 23 pages of documents describing how to make bombs were also
seized. So far there is no word on whether the four men were trafficking
the uranium, which could fetch about $170,000 on the black market, or intending
to make a dirty bomb themselves. "It is too early to say who was behind
smuggling [the uranium] and what was the purpose," says a spokesman for
Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia. The village of Puiya is known as an area
with al-Qaeda sympathies; police recently arrested 17 suspected militants
there for distributing posters and tapes featuring Osama bin Laden. "That
brings in the global terror angle, and we're too close to all this for
comfort," says an Indian intelligence source. He may as well be speaking
for the world.