A man has been arrested under anti-terror laws after a Pakistani package containing uranium was sent to an Iranian business based in Britain.
A suspect described by the press as a businessman with British citizenship — his ethnic background and whether he holds another nationality has not been disclosed as of the time of publication — has been arrested under provisions of the Terrorism Act 2006 which outlaw “making or possessing a radioactive device or possessing radioactive material with the intention of using it” to commission or perpetrate terrorist acts.
“The discovery of what was a very small amount of uranium within a package at Heathrow Airport is clearly of concern, but it shows the effectiveness of the procedures and checks in place with our partners to detect this type of material,” asserted the head of the Counter-Terrorism Command of London’s Metropolitan Police, Richard Smith, in comments quoted by The Telegraph.
“Our priority since launching our investigation has been to ensure that there is no linked direct threat to the public. To this end, we are following every possible line of enquiry available to us, which has led us to making this arrest over the weekend,” he added.
While Commander Smith stressed that “despite making this arrest, and based on what we currently know, this incident still does not appear to be linked to any direct threat to the public,” he warned that “detectives are continuing with their enquiries to ensure this is definitely the case.”
It has long been feared that terrorists could use radioactive material to make a crude nuclear weapon described as a radiological dispersion device, more commonly known as a “dirty bomb”.
Such devices are designed not to create true thermonuclear blasts, like the more sophisticated weapons possessed by nuclear powers, but to contaminate a large area with deadly radioactive material via more conventional explosives.
These fears were particularly acute following the September 11th 2001 radical Islamic terrorist attacks on the United States, with a U.S. Senate hearing in 2002 receiving a report warning that a dirty bomb attack “would have a catastrophic psychological impact on the Nation
and, even worse, it would contaminate a city that would probably result in evacuations and great difficulty in convincing the American public that it could be reinhabited”, and also have a potentially “devastating” impact on the economy.
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