ISIS terrorists could have enough stolen radioactive material to build a potentially devastating dirty bomb to attack the US or Europe, a new report said Wednesday.
The Iraqi government is frantically searching for the missing material, which was stored in a case about the size of a laptop computer and was taken last November from a storage building in southern Iraq near the city of Basra, Reuters reported.
“We are afraid the radioactive element will fall into the hands of Daesh,” said a senior Iraqi security official, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
“They could simply attach it to explosives to make a dirty bomb,” said the official, who works at the interior ministry.
An American company named Weatherford, a contractor that services the oil and gas industry and that owned the storage facility, uses gamma rays from the material to detect flaws in pipelines.
The material itself was owned by Istanbul-based SGS Turkey, according to officials.
Large quantities of the material — Ir-192, a radioactive isotope of iridium — had previously disappeared in the US and several European countries.
Authorities fear the materials could be used to make a dirty bomb, which combines radioactive material with explosives to spread deadly radiation across the target area.
The wire service cited a document its reporters had seen dated Nov. 30 and addressed to the Iraqi environment ministry’s Centre for Prevention of Radiation that describes “the theft of a highly dangerous radioactive source of Ir-192 with highly radioactive activity belonging to SGS from a depot belonging to Weatherford in the Rafidhia area of Basra province.”
A senior environment ministry official based in Basra told Reuters the device contained up to .35 ounces of Ir-192 “capsules.”
The material is classed as a Category 2 radioactive source by the International Atomic Energy Agency, meaning if not managed properly, it could cause permanent injury to a person close to it for even a few minutes or hours and could be deadly to anyone exposed over many hours.
The ministry document said it posed a risk of bodily and environmental harm as well as a national security threat.
A spokesman for Basra operations command, responsible for security in Basra province, said army, police and intelligence forces were working “day and night” to locate the material.
An SGS official in Iraq declined to comment and referred Reuters to its Turkish headquarters, which did not respond to phone calls.
A spokesman for Iraq’s environment ministry said he could not discuss the issue, citing national security concerns.
A Weatherford spokesman in Iraq declined to comment, and the company’s Houston headquarters did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Meanwhile, Belgian police investigating the deadly Paris terror attacks discovered a lengthy video showing the home of a top official at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center, a new report said Wednesday.
The 10-hour-long video was discovered during a raid linked to the Nov. 13 attacks, which killed 130 people and left another 368 injured, the Wall Street Journal reported.
It showed the exterior of a home that investigators eventually figured out belonged to a man working in Belgium’s “nuclear world,” said Thierry Werts, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office.
Werts said a surveillance camera had been concealed in a bush outside the man’s home for an undisclosed amount of time.
Despite the chilling discovery and rise in ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and the US, Werts downplayed any possible links to terrorism.
“There is no element that says that this was to perpetrate an attack,” Werts told the paper, while declining to identify the man or his role in the nuclear industry.
But the Belgian daily De Standaard reported that the homeowner was a top official at the research center in Mol in the north of Belgium.
The center does research into the uses of radioactivity for energy, industry and medicine.