Thaindian News

London, Dec 21 (IANS) With the lone guard at Yemen’s main store of radioactive products being removed and the CCTV system breaking down six months ago, “very little now stands between the bad guys and Yemen’s nuclear material”, said an official in Yemen whose warning is mentioned in a US diplomatic cable released by WikLeaks.The senior government official told the Americans that the solitary guard at Yemen’s National Atomic Energy Commission (NAEC) facility had been removed from his post. Also, the only closed circuit TV security camera had broken down six months back and wasn’t repaired, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

“Very little now stands between the bad guys and Yemen’s nuclear material,” the official said, in a cable dated Jan 9 that was sent from the Sana’a embassy.

Yemen is Al Qaida’s one of most active bases after Iraq and Afghanistan. It is home to Al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula (AQAP).

US Ambassador Stephen Seche said the “worried” official asked Washington to convince the Yemen government “to remove all materials from the country until they can be better secured, or immediately improve security measures at the NAEC facility”.

The cable said that the facility holds large quantities of radioactive material used by hospitals, by local universities for agricultural research, and in oilfields.

The poor security at the Yemen facility would be a “high priority” for the US government, said experts.

When Matthew Bunn, a former White House science adviser who specialises in nuclear threats and terrorism, was told of the cable’s details of the type of materials and the amount stored in Yemen’s NAEC facility, he said: “Holy cow. That’s a big source.”

“If dispersed by terrorists it could make a very nasty dirty bomb capable of contaminating a wide area,” The Guardian quoted Bunn as saying.

He said that such a bomb would be “enough to make a mess that would cost tens of billions of dollars in cleanup costs and economic disruption, with all sorts of controversy over how clean is clean, how will people go back there”.

“The location in Yemen is obviously of particular concern given terrorism, given Al-Qaida in the Arab Peninsula headquartered there, also the spotty effectiveness of the government…I would think it would be a high priority to do something about it.”