Two held in suspected plot to sabotage nuclear power plant

SWEDISH police have detained two men on suspicion of planning to sabotage a nuclear power station yesterday after one of them was discovered entering it with the same explosive used by the thwarted British "shoe bomber", Richard Reid.

"Two men who were taken in for questioning this morning have now been detained on suspicion of preparing for sabotage," said Sven-Erik Karlsson, a spokesman for Kalmar county police.

Police were alerted shortly before 8am by the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant on the southeast coast of Sweden. Initially, police only said they were interrogating one man.

"They told us a welder who was going to perform a job there had been stopped in a random security check. He had been carrying small amounts of the highly explosive material TATP," Mr Karlsson said.

TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, is extremely unstable, especially when subjected to heat, friction and shock.

The compound can be prepared in a home laboratory from easily available household chemicals. It has been used by suicide bombers in Israel and by Richard Reid, who attempted to blow up an American Airlines airliner between Paris and Miami in December 2001.

Police did not initially treat the men as criminal suspects. "They were only being questioned in order to gather information," Mr Karlsson said.

He said both were contract workers and one of them was previously known to police.

Police sealed off a 1,000ft area around the substance and called in explosives technicians from Malmo, the nearest large city.

Oskarshamn, jointly owned by Germany's E.ON and Finland's Fortum, said that it believed the reactor's safety was never threatened. An E.ON spokesman said the material had been found on or inside the first man's bag. "What has happened is that a guy, a contractor, this morning came to the security check with a bag on which, or in which, there were traces of explosives," Johan Aspegren, an E.ON spokesman said.

An official at the plant said the men had been at one of the plant's three reactors, which had been shut for maintenance.

Oskarshamn is one of three nuclear plants in Sweden that meet half the country's power needs.

The Swedish nuclear regulator said there has never been an incident involving sabotage of a nuclear plant, although last year a bomb threat was received at one facility which turned out to be false.

The unstable chemical that can trigger destruction

IT WAS Swedish detection systems that first picked up the radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, forcing the Soviets to admit they had a crisis on their hands.

Sweden's nuclear industry has a very good reputation with the kind of safeguard standards that led to yesterday's discovery.

Professor Hans Michels, an explosives expert at Imperial College London, said TATP was mainly used as an initiator or "trigger explosive" to detonate a larger main charge.

He said the four men who tried unsuccessfully to set off bombs on London transport in July 2005 had used detonators with 5-10g of TATP but failed to ignite the main charge of their devices.

"Normal explosive experts shun (TATP] because it's very unstable, it's dangerous and it's not very pure. It tends to decompose," Prof Michels said.