Eastern Libyan forces said on Thursday that 10 drums of uranium declared missing by the UN nuclear watchdog had been found near the warehouse they were taken from in southern Libya. Khaled Mahjoub, head of a media unit for the Libyan National Army, the main eastern military force, said in a statement that the 10 missing barrels had been recovered, though a separate video he sent showed workers counting 18.
The IAEA said in a confidential statement to member states seen by Reuters that it detected the missing uranium during a check at an unnamed site in Libya on Tuesday which it had postponed last year because of the security situation. Mahjoub said the site was a warehouse toward the border with Chad that the IAEA visited in 2020 and sealed with red wax. The barrels were found about 5 km (3 miles) from the warehouse, he added. He speculated that a group from Chad had raided the warehouse and taken the barrels hoping they might contain weapons or ammunition, but had abandoned them. The IAEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mahjoub’s statement. It told member states that the uranium ore concentrate had been at a site not under government control requiring complex logistics to reach. It said the missing uranium could represent a radiological and nuclear security concern.— Reuters
