DOZENS of missiles fitted with warheads that can scatter radioactivity on impact appear to have gone missing after years of storage in a breakaway region of Moldova, an expert said yesterday.
Oazu Nantoi, a political analyst who works at the non-governmental Institute for Policy Studies in Chisinau, said he had seen photocopies of documents produced by Russian military officials stating that the warheads - modified into "dirty bombs" - we
re stored in a deposit at Tiraspol military airport in Trans-Dniester.
He said that 24 of the warheads were ready for use, while 14 of them had been dismantled. The documents came from a disgruntled Russian military official who claimed he had not received compensation for being exposed to radioactive material, Mr Nantoi said, adding they were "a real danger to those handling the weapons and those in the deposit".
The possibility of terrorists acquiring such a "dirty bomb" has become a main concern of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. IAEA director-general Mohamed El Baradei said last week that his agency is now "spending a great deal of time working on this threat".
Mr Nantoi is a respected expert on the breakaway region of Trans-Dniester, which is populated by ethnic Slavs and has been policed by Russian troops since the region’s fight for independence 12 years ago.
The Organisation for Security and Co-operation and other agencies have expressed repeated concern about reports that the region is the centre for weapon-smuggling rings.
Moldova is a former Soviet republic and weapons and ammunition remain stored in Trans-Dniester in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. The region also has a big arms industry.
Mr Nantoi said reports that Alazan rockets, used in the former USSR for weather experiments, had been fitted with warheads modified to carry radioactive material first reached him in 1998. Since then, the rockets and warheads seem to have disappeared.
