A Very Dirty Plot

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Islamic extremists in Bangladesh may be trying to make a radioactive "dirty" bomb. On May 30, Bangladeshi police arrested four suspected members of a militant Islamic group, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, at a house in the northern village of Puiya. Officers also seized a football-size package with markings indicating it contained a crude form of uranium manufactured in Kazakhstan. Subsequent tests last week at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission in Dhaka confirmed the 225-gram ball is uranium oxide—enough to make a weapon capable of dispersing radiation across a wide area if strapped to conventional explosives. A scientist at the commission told TIME that 23 pages of documents describing how to make bombs were also seized. So far there is no word on whether the four men were trafficking the uranium, which could fetch about $170,000 on the black market, or intending to make a dirty bomb themselves. "It is too early to say who was behind smuggling [the uranium] and what was the purpose," says a spokesman for Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia. The village of Puiya is known as an area with al-Qaeda sympathies; police recently arrested 17 suspected militants there for distributing posters and tapes featuring Osama bin Laden. "That brings in the global terror angle, and we're too close to all this for comfort," says an Indian intelligence source. He may as well be speaking for the world.