KABUL, May 18 (Reuters) - An official with the fundamentalist Islamic Taleban militia in Kabul said officials had seized from smugglers a container which he said held uranium.
In an interview with journalists at his home on Saturday, the Taleban governor of Kabul, Mullah Khairullah Khairkhwa, displayed the sealed lead container covered with raised cyrillic script.
It was seized from smugglers in Kabul on May 10.
He said another container of suspected uranium had been seized some months ago, but did not give further details. Khairkhwa told journalists the Taleban had not yet run any tests on the container or its contents.
"The report (that led to the arrest of the smugglers) said that they were smuggling uranium. We still have to conduct some research on this thing." Khairkhwa told reporters.
Enriched uranium is a key component of atomic bombs, and there have been a number of confirmed cases of it being smuggled from the former Soviet Union to Western Europe.
An assistant of Khairkhwa produced the dull-grey 15 cm (six inch)-high container, which was wrapped in a piece of cloth, from the base of a vacuum flask.
Khairkhwa said it had been hidden in the vacuum flask when it was seized from a woman in central Kabul on May 10.
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