Moscow Times, Russia
Aug 22 2005

FSB Says Terrorists Are Trying to Secure WMD

By Simon Saradzhyan
Staff Writer

CIS security forces storming an oil tanker in Aktau, Kazakhstan,
during a counterterrorism exercise on Thursday.

Terrorist groups are making attempts to acquire weapons of mass
destruction, including nuclear and biological weapons, Federal
Security Service director Nikolai Patrushev told colleagues from
other former Soviet republics on Friday.

“The terrorists are striving to obtain access to biological, nuclear
and chemical weapons. We record this, and we have such information,”
Patrushev said at a meeting with his counterparts from other
countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States.

“Our mission is to deny them such access,” Patrushev said at the
meeting in Aktau, Kazakhstan, which followed a counterterrorism
exercise in which CIS forces simulated the seizure of an oil tanker
by a terrorist group in the Caspian Sea.

Patrushev did not give any details about who had tried to acquire WMD
or when and where the attempts had taken place. Russia and the other
11 countries of the CIS were supposed to have destroyed their
biological weapons long ago in accordance with international
conventions.

The United States and several other countries have expressed worries
that terrorists could acquire nuclear, biological or chemical weapons
materials in Russia and other former Soviet republics.

Patrushev said the Federal Security Service, or FSB, was evaluating
security and accountability in the defense industry and other
enterprises that are or have been involved in the development and
production of WMD to ensure that they are impenetrable to terrorist
groups.

“We are really checking these enterprises and, as of today, we are
taking measures to eliminate those flaws that exist,” he said,
Interfax reported.

He said the FSB was focusing on preventive measures.

“At the moment, we evaluate the situation this way: Terrorists will
not get the weapons they’re striving for,” he said. “Nonetheless, in
light of the aim of terrorists to get access to weapons of mass
destruction, we must perfect this work.”

Earlier this summer, the chief of the Defense Ministry’s nuclear
safety and security department said there was a constant stream of
intelligence from the FSB indicating that terrorist groups were
developing plans to target the military’s nuclear arsenals. “We have
special information continuously coming from the Federal Security
Service on terrorist groups’ plans against our facilities,” Igor
Valynkin, head of the ministry’s 12th Main Directorate, said in June.

Patrushev’s comments came after Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev
threatened to stage new terrorist attacks and hinted that he might go
beyond conventional attacks. In an interview broadcast by the U.S.
television network ABC on July 28, Basayev vowed to “do everything
possible” to end the second Chechen war. Basayev had ordered
radioactive materials planted in Moscow and threatened to detonate
them to end the first Chechen war.

“I am trying not to cross the line. And so far, I have not crossed
it,” Basayev said in the interview, which was taped in late June.
Basayev has claimed responsibility for the Beslan school
hostage-taking, which killed more than 330 people, and scores of
other terrorist attacks.

During the first and second wars, Chechen rebels sought to acquire
radioactive and biological materials, plotted to hijack a nuclear
submarine and cased military nuclear installations.

While initially skeptical of the threat of WMD terrorism, Russian
authorities are increasingly acknowledging the imminence of the
menace and are working to safeguard nuclear, chemical and biological
substances at military and civil installations with financial and
technical assistance from the West.

One sign of this change in attitude is that the military and the FSB
are holding regular exercises in repelling possible terrorist attacks
on nuclear installations. The next CIS counterterrorism exercise will
focus on repelling an attack on a nuclear power plant and will take
place in Armenia in 2006, Patrushev said.

Patrushev also said the FSB had helped investigate violence in the
eastern Uzbek city of Andijan earlier this year.

He said the FSB had offered to assist in the London subway and bus
bombings but that the offer had been declined.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress