UK Edition
More than two tonnes of Colonel Gadaffi’s uranium was accidentally stolen, according to a Libyan warlord who claims to have found it in the desert.
General Khaled al-Mahjoub, commander of eastern strongman Khalifa Haftar's communications division, said on his Facebook page that the containers of uranium had been recovered “barely five kilometres” from where they had been stored in the Sabha area of southern Libya.
Gen Mahjoub published a video showing a man in a protective suit counting 18 blue containers, which was the total that had been stored at the site.
“The situation is under control. The IAEA has been informed,” Gen Mahjoub told AFP.
He suggested the containers had been stolen and then abandoned by “a Chadian faction who thought they were weapons or ammunition”.
Fighters from neighbouring Chad have previously been known to have bases in southern Libya.
Earlier on Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported that 2.5 tonnes of the material had gone missing from a Libyan site and “may present a radiological risk”, according to a confidential report.
Uranium ore concentrate is considered to emit low levels of radioactivity.
Natural uranium must be converted into a gas and spun in centrifuges to enrich it before it can be used for energy production or as fuel for an atomic weapon.
But with the right equipment and knowledge, a ton of natural uranium could be refined to produce about 5.6 kilograms of weapons-grade material, experts say, making it imperative to find the missing material.
Gaddafi once stored thousands of barrels of yellowcake uranium at the site in the Sahara Desert for a planned uranium conversion facility as part of his secret nuclear weapons programme that the late dictator only declared following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
6,400 barrels stored at Sabha
While inspectors removed the last of the enriched uranium from Libya in 2009, the yellowcake remained behind, with the UN in 2013 estimating some 6,400 barrels of it were stored at Sabha.
US officials had worried Iran could try to purchase the uranium from Libya, something Gaddafi’s top civilian nuclear official tried to reassure the US about, according to a 2009 diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks.
“Stressing that Libya viewed the question as primarily a commercial one, [the official] noted that prices for uranium yellowcake on the world market had been increasing and that Libya wanted to maximise its profit by properly timing the sale of its stockpile,” then-Ambassador Gene A Cretz wrote.
Since Gaddafi was killed following the Arab Spring uprising of 2011, the lawless area around Sabha has come under the control of the warlord Khalifa Haftar, who has battled the Tripoli government for control of the country.
A spokesperson for Gen Haftar did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.