Free Republic

THREE radioactive rockets capable of contaminating a city centre were offered for sale last week to a Sunday Times reporter posing as a middleman for Islamic terrorists. The Alazan rockets, which have a range of eight miles, were among 50,000 tons of weapons left behind at an arms dump in the breakaway eastern European republic of Transdniester when the Russian army withdrew after the cold war. They were offered to the reporter for $500,000 (£263,000) after he approached a senior officer in Transdniester’s secret police, claiming to represent a militant group in Algeria. The officer contacted a local arms dealer...

<p>December 9, 2003 -- CHISINAU, Moldova - Dozens of rockets outfitted with so-called "dirty bombs" are missing in a breakaway region of the former Soviet republic of Moldova, an expert said yesterday.</p> <p>Oazu Nantoi, a political analyst at the nongovernmental Institute for Policy Studies in Chisinau, said he had seen photocopies of Russian military documents that revealed at least 38 dirty-bomb warheads had disappeared from a storage depot near the Trans-Dniester Tiraspol military airport.</p>

TIRASPOL, Moldova -- In the ethnic conflicts that surrounded the collapse of the Soviet Union, fighters in several countries seized upon an unlikely new weapon: a small, thin rocket known as the Alazan. Originally built for weather experiments, the Alazan was transformed into a terror weapon, packed with explosives and lobbed into cities. Military records show that at least 38 Alazan warheads were modified to carry radioactive material, effectively creating the world's first surface-to-surface dirty bomb. The warheads are not known to have been used. But now, according to experts and officials, they have disappeared.