Russia seizes Iran-bound radioactive metal material; Tehran dismisses report as ‘lie’

The Russian customs service said on Friday it had seized radioactive material found in the luggage of a passenger bound for Tehran at Moscow's Sheremetyevo international airport.

The service said in a statement that tests showed the material was a radioactive isotope which could be obtained only “as a result of a nuclear reactor's operations,” according to Reuters.

The statement said the material had triggered an alarm in the airport’s radiation control system. The luggage search led to a discovery of 18 pieces of radioactive metal packed in individual steel casings.

A Sheremetyevo airport customs spokeswoman said by telephone that the material had been identified as sodium-22 but gave no other details.

Sodium-22 is a radioactive isotope of sodium that can be used in medical equipment. “There is no weapons aspect to this (material),” Research director Lars-Erik De Geer of the Swedish Defense Research Institute told Reuters.

Prosecutors have launched a probe into the incident, Grebenkina said, according to The Associated Press.

An official in Iran’s embassy in Moscow told the Iranian news agency ISNA the seizure of radioactive material from a Tehran-bound passenger at Moscow airport reported by Russian authorities is “a lie.”

“The news of the discovery of a radioactive consignment headed for Iran in Moscow is a lie,“ the embassy official told ISNA.

Western reports on the seizure were aimed at “sabotaging Russo-Iranian relations and trying to create problems and tensions in relations by fabricating issues,“ the unnamed official was quoted as saying.

The official, when asked about the Sodium-22 at Moscow airport, spoke of an incident he said happened several weeks ago.

“Around a month ago a misunderstanding occurred with a university student who was carrying material used for dentistry. This issue was quickly solved and he was offered an apology for the misunderstanding,” the embassy official told ISNA.

Tension is rising between Western powers and Iran after a United Nations nuclear watchdog report last month that said Tehran appeared to have worked on designing a nuclear weapon, and that secret research to that end may be continuing.Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.

A couple of weeks ago, EU foreign ministers agreed to develop new sanctions on Iran’s energy, transport and banking sectors.

Sergei Novikov, spokesman for the Rosatom nuclear agency, told the AP that the pieces are highly unlikely to have come from Rosatom and said the isotope is produced by particle accelerators, not by nuclear reactors.

In Russia, universities, research institutes and big medical centers can have the technology to produce it, he said.

“There is an extremely slim chance that it could have come from Rosatom,” he said.

Novikov said that Rosatom has never sold Sodium-22 to Iran, but it has supplied it with other types of medical isotopes.

Russia, which built Iran’s first nuclear power station, has said it might help Tehran construct more atomic plants.