Tuesday, October 1

Police arrest man in Germany for sending nuclear material to Iran


La policía de Alemania arrestó este martes a un hombre por enviar material nuclear a Irán.
German police arrested a man on Tuesday for sending nuclear material to Iran.

Photo: PAUL ZINKEN / Getty Images

German police arrested a German-Iranian man on Tuesday in Berlin suspected of exporting equipment to be used in alleged nuclear programs in Iran, thus violating the sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU ) that prohibit trading with that country, reported Reuters .

According to the prosecution, the local authorities registered a total of 11 properties in the name of the alleged suspect or in Hamburg, Schleswig Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia , near the border with the Netherlands.

Alexander J., as identified in Germany, had sent € 1.1 million worth of equipment to a man in Iran representing a company that is on the EU blacklist for receiving equipment for nuclear and ballistic programs in the Arab country.

The German prosecutor’s office reported that the suspect had already been arrested in 2018 and 2019 for illegally acquiring laboratory equipment. In January 2020 sent a spectrometer, which is used to measure the properties of light in the electromagnetic spectrum, to Iran. Six months later he sent two more to the same person. The device is valued at almost 200, euros each.

Western countries have accused Iran of trying to obtain nuclear material using fictitious companies to evade international sanctions. In 2015, that country signed an agreement with the major world powers in which if they lowered trade bans, Tehran would limit its The nuclear program, however, that deal has so far not been honored.

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