A suspect linked to the Nov. 13 Paris attackers was found with surveillance footage of a high-ranking Belgian nuclear official, the Belgian authorities acknowledged on Thursday, raising fears that the Islamic State is trying to obtain radioactive material for a terrorist attack. The existence of the footage, which the police in Belgium seized on Nov. 30, was confirmed by Thierry Werts, a spokesman for Belgium’s federal prosecutor, after being reported in the Belgian daily newspaper La Dernière Heure.The news set off an immediate uproar among Belgian lawmakers, who charged that they and the country had been misled about the extent of the potential threats to the country’s nuclear facilities, as well as about the ambitions of the terrorist network linked to the Islamic State that used Belgium to plot the Paris attacks, which killed 130 people.
New York Times 19th Feb 2016 read more »
Radioactive material has been declared stolen from an oil depot in Iraq, sparking fears among officials it could be used as a weapon if seized by Islamic State. The “highly dangerous” Iridium-192, which was stored in a protective case the size of a laptop, went missing from a storage facility belonging to a US oilfield company in the southern city of Basra. A senior environment ministry official told Reuters up to 10g of Iridium-192 in capsules could not be traced. The substance itself is the property of Istanbul-based SGS Turkey.
IB Times 18th Feb 2016 read more »