Word: iskenderun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Antwerp harbor with a Liberian flag flying from its mast and 560 drums of "yellowcake"-a crude concentrate of uranium-packed beneath its decks. The ship never reached its declared destination of Genoa, Italy. Instead, after 15 days at sea it docked at the Turkish port of Iskenderun on Dec. 2, riding high in the water. Its strategic cargo-200 tons of uranium, worth $3.7 million, that could potentially be used for nuclear weapons-had vanished. The disappearance of the uranium was first disclosed last month by Paul Leventhal, a former counsel to the Senate Committee on Government Operations...
...Hijacking. Investigators for the European Community began looking for the missing uranium several months after the Scheersberg A showed up empty at Iskenderun. They developed evidence that the cargo had not vanished in a hijacking: the uranium was shipped by a firm that knew it would never arrive at its destination in Italy. The firm was a now-defunct German petrochemical company called Asmara Chemie, and it had purchased the uranium-which was mined in what is now Zaire-from the Belgian mineral firm Societe Generale des Minerals. Asmara Chemie had no previous record of buying uranium...
...cannot be traced because they had forged passports and false identities. But one of TIME'S sources talked with a former Israeli crew member in 1973, in the Ivory Coast. According to the sailor, after leaving Antwerp the Scheersberg A sailed straight for the waters between Cyprus and Iskenderun. Without breaking radio silence, it made a rendezvous at night with an Israeli ship that carried a special winch. As two Israeli gunboats hovered near the freighters, the barrels of uranium were transferred in total darkness. Except for an occasional Hebrew command, no one spoke. The uranium, TIME...