Smugglers caught in nuclear 'set-up' jailed

ARTHUR ALLEN

Associated Press

Bonn - A Munich court yesterday jailed three nuclear smugglers despite evidence that the operation was conceived by German undercover agents who offered the equivalent of pounds 170m for enough Russian plutonium to make a bomb. The three men had confessed to smuggling plutonium, but asked for mild sentences, claiming they were entrapped. They were convicted of violations of the weapons law.

Justitiano Torres Benitez, a 39-year-old Colombian, was sentenced to four years and 10 months. Julio Oroz Eguia, 50, and Javier Bengoechea, 61, Spanish middlemen in the deal, were given sentences of three years and 10 months, and three years, respectively.

They were detained on 10 August 1994, in the most alarming seizure of bomb-grade material to that date, after Torres landed at Munich on a flight from Moscow with 12 ounces of 88 per cent fissionable plutonium- 239.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, underpaid nuclear technicians have been selling dangerous material. German police reported 182 cases of radioactive smuggling in 1994.

The same report stated there was no evidence of buyers for the material, which mostly surfaced in deals arranged by police and journalists. A Bonn parliamentary committee is investigating claims that the Munich case was instigated by Madrid-based narcotics-turned-nuclear agents of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND).