Looks like whatever was on the ship is no longer on the ship

Prosecutors confirm Arctic Sea anchored off Gibraltar

MOSCOW, October 8 (RIA Novosti) - Russian prosecutors confirmed on Thursday that the Arctic Sea cargo vessel, at the centre of a mysterious hijacking case in July, is currently anchored off Gibraltar.
The Finnish-owned, Maltese-flagged cargo ship manned by a Russian crew and listed as carrying lumber from Russia to Algeria, was reportedly boarded by a group of eight men on July 24. Officials later said it had disappeared in the Atlantic. It was freed off Cape Verde on August 16 by a Russian warship.
"The Arctic Sea vessel escorted by a tugboat and the Ladny patrol ship is currently anchored off Gibraltar in the Mediterranean," the Investigative Committee at the Russian Prosecutor General's Office said in a statement.
The captain and three crew members are on board.

www.timesofmalta.com

..."After standing at anchor for nearly two weeks in the Mediterranean Sea near eastern Gibraltar, the Arctic Sea has begun moving toward Malta accompanied by ships of the Black Sea Fleet," the source told RIA-Novosti.
"The arrival in the Maltese port of Valletta is expected on October 29," the source said, adding that Russian officials would then take part in negotiations on the ship's handover.
Solchart, the Helsinki-based company that owns the Arctic Sea, could not immediately be reached for comment....

Originally posted by smurfy
reply to post by mmiichael

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I'm not convinced that Iran was to be the receptor of dirty stuff from the Arctic Sea, it just seems too politically inspired and now we have UN inspectors there in Iran to boot. Why not Syria with insurgents in Iraq, todays/yesterdays bombs in Baghdad were huge by any standard, could they have been mini-nukes? Syria is alledged to have a nuclear programme. Why is a boat with three people on board still being treated like the plague?

www.military.com...

N. Korea Suspected In Sale Of Nukes
Associated Press
May 24, 2004

VIENNA, Austria - North Korea has emerged as a possible supplier in the clandestine nuclear network, with diplomats on Sunday saying the communist country was the likely source of nearly two tons of uranium that Libya bought for its now-scrapped weapons program.

The revelations stoked concern that Iran and other nations also could have benefited from cooperation with the secretive nation to get fuel, components and the knowledge needed to build nuclear weapons.

Previously, Pakistan - the key country implicated in a worldwide nuclear black market - had been thought to be the source of 1.87 tons of uranium hexafluoride that Libya handed over to Americans in January as part of its decision to get rid of weapons of mass destruction.

Now, the evidence increasingly points to North Korea, the diplomats said, though they cautioned that the investigation was not yet complete and other sources for Libya's program could not be ruled out. The diplomats spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

The new evidence pointing to North Korea came from the International Atomic Energy Agency and was based on interviews with members of the clandestine network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist implicated in selling his country's nuclear secrets to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and possibly other countries, according to one diplomat.

A U.S. official, however, told AP that U.S. intelligence was "still pursuing" the alleged North Korean link "to see how much truth there is to it" and needed more information to "disprove" Pakistan as the source.

One major proliferation concern is Iran, whose nuclear program already is under scrutiny because of fears it might be developing weapons.

Iran's activities are up for review next month when the International Atomic Energy Agency's board meets to discuss the state of investigations into programs that go back nearly two decades and include covert attempts to enrich uranium, reprocessing small amounts of plutonium and other suspect activities with possible weapons applications.

Inspections last year by the Vienna-based IAEA showed that Iran failed to report imports in 1991 of large amounts of uranium hexafluoride - the same substance shipped to Libya, apparently by North Korea.

While the origin of the Iran shipments was China, other channels of weapons cooperation between the communist North and the Islamic regime appear to exist at least since the early 1980s, when North Korea sold about 100 refitted Soviet Scud B missiles to Tehran, which used them in its war against Iraq.

More recently, Japanese media quoted unidentified military officials as saying North Korea and Iran had agreed on joint production of long-range ballistic missiles. One of the diplomats who spoke to AP on Sunday cited intelligence saying that North Korean officials were believed to have visited Tehran last year, possibly in connection with such a deal.

Pirouz Hosseini, Iran's chief delegate to the IAEA, said he was "not aware of such cooperation at all," between his country and North Korea.

"These are just intelligence reports," he told AP.

One of the diplomats said as far as he knew the IAEA report up for review in June would not link North Korea to Iran's nuclear programs.

But another said that with other countries, notably Pakistan, now established as supplying both Libya and Iran with centrifuges for uranium enrichment, further investigations could also well connect North Korea to Tehran, considering the "interlinkage between suppliers and recipients that runs through the investigations into the (nuclear) black market."