DAR AL HARB - GEORGIA (FORMER U.S.S.R.): WE HAVE A 'BLUE LIGHT SPECIAL' ON URANIUM

Atomic smugglers pose new hazard for former Soviet republics
Ex-Soviet republics provide fertile ground for black market

TBILISI, Georgia: Last January, a Russian man with sunken cheeks and a wispy mustache crossed into Georgia and traveled to Tbilisi by car along a high mountain road. In two plastic bags in his leather jacket, the Georgian authorities say, he carried 100 grams of uranium so refined that it could help fuel an atom bomb.

The Russian, Oleg Khinsagov, had come to meet a buyer who he believed would pay him $1 million and deliver the material to a Muslim man from "a serious organization," the authorities say.

The uranium was a sample, and the deal a test: If all went smoothly, he had boasted, he would sell a far larger cache stored in his apartment back in Vladikavkaz: Two or three kilograms of the rare material, or four and a half to six and a half pounds, which in expert hands is enough to make a small bomb.

The buyer, it turned out, was a Georgian agent. Alerted to Khinsagov's ambitions by spies in South Ossetia, Georgian officials arrested him, confiscated his merchandise and eventually turned it over to U.S. officials for analysis. After a secret trial, the smuggler was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.

The case of Khinsagov has alarmed Georgian and American officials because they had thought that an array of new security precautions had tamped down the nuclear black market that developed in the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed.

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1) Atomic smugglers pose new hazard for former Soviet republics