A member of the Japanese legal underworld has pleaded responsible to dealing with nuclear materials sourced from Myanmar and in search of to promote it to fund a bootleg arms deal, US authorities have stated.
Yakuza chief Takeshi Ebisawa and a co-defendant had beforehand been charged in April 2022 with drug trafficking and firearms offences, and each have been remanded.
He was then moreover charged in February 2024 with conspiring to promote weapons-grade nuclear materials and deadly narcotics from Myanmar, and to buy navy weaponry on behalf of an armed rebel group, prosecutors stated.
The navy weaponry to be a part of the arms deal included surface-to-air missiles, the indictment alleged.
“As he admitted in federal court docket at the moment, Takeshi Ebisawa openly trafficked nuclear materials, together with weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma,” appearing US lawyer Edward Kim stated on Wednesday, utilizing one other title for Myanmar.
“On the similar time, he labored to ship large portions of heroin and methamphetamine to america in trade for heavy-duty weaponry equivalent to surface-to-air missiles for use on battlefields in Burma.”
Prosecutors alleged that Ebisawa, 60, “openly” moved materials containing uranium and weapons-grade plutonium, alongside medication, from Myanmar.
From 2020, Ebisawa boasted to an undercover officer he had entry to giant portions of nuclear supplies that he sought to promote, offering images of supplies alongside Geiger counters registering radiation.
Throughout a sting operation together with undercover brokers, Thai authorities assisted US investigators in seizing two powdery yellow substances that the defendant described as “yellowcake.”
“The (US) laboratory decided that the isotope composition of the plutonium discovered within the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, that means that the plutonium, if produced in enough portions, can be appropriate to be used in a nuclear weapon,” the Justice Division stated in its assertion on the time.
One in every of Ebisawa’s co-conspirators claimed they “had obtainable greater than 2,000 kilograms (4,400 kilos) of Thorium-232 and greater than 100 kilograms of uranium within the compound U3O8 – referring to a compound of uranium generally discovered within the uranium focus powder referred to as ’yellowcake’.”
The indictment claimed Ebisawa had instructed utilizing the proceeds of the sale of nuclear materials to fund weapons purchases on behalf of an unnamed ethnic rebel group in Myanmar.
Ebisawa faces as much as 20 years’ imprisonment for the trafficking of nuclear supplies internationally.
Prosecutors describe Ebisawa as a “chief of the Yakuza organised crime syndicate, a extremely organised, transnational Japanese legal community that operates around the globe (and whose) legal actions have included large-scale narcotics and weapons trafficking.”
Sentencing will probably be decided by the decide within the case at a later date, prosecutors stated.
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