PrintMarch 27, 2008
Colombia captures Uranium from FARC
A 66 pound stash of uranium belonging to the narco-terrorist group FARC has been captured by the Colombian military. Information on the stash was found on a computer hard drive captured after a raid by the Columbian army killed a top FARC official who was hiding along the border with Ecudador:
The uranium was found in a rural area long considered a Marxist guerrilla stronghold just south of the capital Bogota. It is being examined by government experts, the defense ministry said in a statement, although it did not say where the material came from or what it could be used for.There was no word on what kind of uranium was discovered. If it was simple uranium ore, 66 pounds would not be near enough to turn into a bomb. Even if it was highly enriched uranium - bomb grade material - it would fall short of being enough for most known bomb designs.
An expert on Colombia's cocaine-fueled conflict said rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, do not have the facilities needed to make a bomb with uranium.
"This appears to have been part of a black market operation that the guerrillas were trying to use to make money," said Pablo Casas, an analyst at Bogota think-tank Security and Democracy.
So it appears that FARC was simply trying to sell it on the black market. It would be of vital interest to find out if the terrorists had a buyer already lined up and to discover their identity.
It could very well be that the Colombian efforts to hinder FARC's narcotics operations are meeting with some success and the terrorists have turned to other sources of black market revenue. If so, their friend Hugo Chavez better be careful that he not become ensnared in any transaction involving material that could be used as a weapon of mass destruction.
Correction: A sharp reader pointed out that the FARC official whose hard drive the information on the uranium came from was actually killed along the Colombian border with Ecuador, not Venezuela.
