International

Georgia Reports an Attempt to Smuggle Uranium

By Lawrence Sheets

Published January 25, 2007 at 1:00 PM PST

This story was published more than 17 years ago.

The Georgian government says its security services have foiled an attempt by a Russian smuggler to sell weapons-grade uranium on the black market.

Georgia's Interior Ministry says the man was arrested as he tried to sell a few ounces of the highly enriched uranium for $1 million to a Georgian agent posing as a member of a radical Islamist group.

The material had been refined to the level that could be used, in larger quantities, in a nuclear weapon. The smuggler told the agent the uranium was just a sample, and that he had access to up to 10 pounds of the material.

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International

Lawrence Sheets

Lawrence Scott Sheets concentrates on covering the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union from his base in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. From 2001 to 2005, Sheets was NPR’s Moscow Bureau Chief, and covered the countries of former USSR, including Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Among major stories Sheets has covered for NPR have been the tragic siege of a school by a pro-Chechen separatist terror group in 2004 in which 330 mostly children were killed, the 6-week long "Orange Revolution" that brought down Ukraine’s old government in 2004, and the "Rose Revolution" in Georgia in 2003. Sheets has also reported for NPR from Iran and Afghanistan. He covered the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan during 2001 and 2002, including the bloody Taliban uprising at a fortress in Mazar e Sharif in which hundreds of people died.Sheets’ reports can be heard on NPR's , All Things Considered, Day to Day, and Weekend Edition.