MOSCOW (Reuter) - Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has arrested a scientist for manufacturing and smuggling abroad materials that could be used in nuclear devices, Itar-Tass news agency reported Tuesday.
Tass quoted an FSB spokesman in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk as saying the scientist, using his own technology, had produced at least 2.2 pounds of the material and tried to smuggle it out of the country.
Tass said the material had a dual use but did not name it. FSB officials were not immediately available for comment.
Suspicion arose when the FSB, Russia's counter-intelligence force, noticed an export declaration submitted by the scientist named a different substance to the one contained in a parcel.
``An analysis established that the radioactive powder prepared for export was of a dual use and could be used for military purposes,'' Tass said.
But Tass later quoted the head of Krasnoyarsk region's FSB branch as saying that the material was not radioactive.
``This was not plutonium or uranium or anything of the sort,'' Anatoly Samkov told Tass.
``This is about a substance that might be used as a component of nuclear devices -- a coating, pipe or something like that.''
The scientist, who was not named, had a patent to use ``technology of an explosion'' to produce powder whose particles were as hard as artificial gems, a technology unmatched in the West, Tass said.
The scientist used his own laboratory at a Krasnoyarsk institute to produce the material, it added.
Tass did not say when the scientist had been detained, or identify the country to which the substance had been smuggled.
Investigators were trying to find out who had helped the scientist produce the material and take it abroad.
Tass said the FSB's central office in Moscow had confirmed the arrest.
Krasnoyarsk, in eastern Siberia, is a major military industrial center. In Soviet times, two of its satellite towns, Krasnoyarsk-26 and Krasnoyarsk-45, used to be known as ``nuclear cities.''
A plant at the first city was the world's largest producer of plutonium for nuclear weapons. The second city produced enriched uranium until 1987 but is now involved in fuel energy production.
Tass said later the scientist lived in Krasnoyarsk itself, not in a satellite town.
Western countries, especially Germany, have expressed concern over illegal nuclear exports from post-Soviet Russia and security conditions in warehouses where such material is kept.
Last month, President Boris Yeltsin and leaders of the Group of Seven rich democracies agreed at a summit in Moscow a package of measures aimed at enhancing nuclear safety.
The package included a program for closer intelligence cooperation to prevent the growing problem of illicit trade in nuclear materials which might be used to build a bomb.
The arrest of the scientist came amid a growing but seemingly unrelated diplomatic scandal between Russia and Britain.
Russia accused some British diplomats in Moscow of running a spy ring after a Russian had been arrested accused of passing classified information to British special services.
17:18 05-07-96
source: Reuters