SWEDEN: Swedish police detained two men on suspicion of planning to sabotage a nuclear power station yesterday after one of them was discovered entering it with small amounts of a highly explosive material.
"Two men who were taken in for questioning this morning have now been detained on suspicion of preparing for "sabotage", said Kalmar County Police spokesman Sven-Erik Karlsson.
Police were alerted shortly before 8am by the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant on the southeast coast of Sweden. "They told us a welder who was going to perform a job there had been stopped in a random security check. He had been carrying small amounts of the highly explosive material TATP," he said.
TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, is a high explosive which is extremely unstable, especially when subjected to heat, friction and shock.
The compound can be prepared in a home laboratory from easily available household chemicals. It has been employed by suicide bombers in Israel and by Richard Reid, the thwarted British "shoebomber" who attempted to blow up a transatlantic airliner in 2001.
Police did not initially treat the men as criminal suspects. "They were only being questioned in order to gather information," Mr Karlsson said, adding he had no details on the ages or nationalities of the two.
Police sealed off a 300-meter (330-yard) area around the substance and called in explosives technicians from Malmo.
Oskarshamn, jointly owned by Germany's E.ON and Finland's Fortum, said it believed the reactor's safety was never threatened. An E.ON spokesman said the material had been found on or inside the man's bag: "What has happened is that a guy, a contractor, this morning came to the security check with a bag on which, or in which, there were traces of explosives." An official at the plant said neither of the men was an employee there. They had been at one of the plant's three reactors, which had been shut for maintenance.
Prof Hans Michels, an explosives expert at Imperial College London, said TATP was mainly used as an initiator or "trigger explosive" to detonate a larger main charge. - (Reuters)