The US government on Wednesday charged the leader of a Japanese crime syndicate with conspiring to traffic nuclear materials from Myanmar for expected use by Iran in nuclear weapons.
Takeshi Ebisawa, 60, and co-defendant Somphop Singhasiri, 61, trafficked in drugs, weapons and nuclear material, “going so far as to offer uranium and weapons-grade plutonium fully expecting that Iran would use it for nuclear weapons,” said Anne Milgram, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to the US Justice Department.
Both men have been ordered detained, the department said in a statement. Ebisawa is accused of conspiring to sell weapons-grade nuclear material and lethal narcotics from Myanmar and to buy military weapons on behalf of an armed insurgent group, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said. “It is chilling to imagine the consequences had these efforts succeeded,” Olsen said. The two men were charged in 2022 with international narcotics trafficking and firearms offenses. The new charges were contained in a superseding indictment.
Beginning in early 2020, Ebisawa informed an undercover agent (UC-1) and a DEA confidential source (CS-1) that Ebisawa had access to a large quantity of nuclear materials that he wanted to sell, according to the allegations contained in the indictment. Later that year, Ebisawa sent UC-1 a series of photographs depicting rocky substances with Geiger counters measuring radiation, as well as pages of what Ebisawa represented to be lab analyses indicating the presence of thorium and uranium in the depicted substances.
In response to Ebisawa’s repeated inquiries, UC-1 agreed, as part of the DEA’s investigation, to help Ebisawa broker the sale of his nuclear materials to UC-1’s associate, who was posing as an Iranian general (the General), for use in a nuclear weapons program. Ebisawa then offered to supply the General with “plutonium” that would be even “better” and more “powerful” than uranium for this purpose.
During their discussions regarding Ebisawa’s access to nuclear materials, Ebisawa also engaged with UC-1 concerning Ebisawa’s desire to purchase military-grade weapons. To that end, in May 2021, Ebisawa sent UC-1 a list of weapons, including surface-to-air missiles, that Ebisawa wished to purchase from UC-1 on behalf of the leader of an ethnic insurgent group in Burma (CC-1). Together with two other co-conspirators (CC-2 and CC-3), Ebisawa proposed to UC-1 that CC-1 sell uranium to the General, through Ebisawa, to fund CC-1’s weapons purchase.
Comments
0 comment