However, officials said the radioactive material was useful only for medical purposes and had no military applications.
The young man was stopped at the airport in mid-November because his luggage was found to contain substances exceeding by 20 times the natural background radiation level, Ksenia Grebenkina, a spokeswoman for the airport’s customs office, told the Bloomberg news service after a notice of the incident was posted on the customs website.
Further study found the substance was sodium-22, she said. “There wasn’t enough evidence to open a criminal case, so there were no grounds to hold the young man.” He was then released.
Iran’s embassy in Moscow told the Iranian Students News Agency the story was “a lie” created by Westerners trying to “sabotage Russo-Iranian relations.” But the story didn’t come from Western news agencies, it came from the Russian Customs Service.
The Iranian embassy official said there had simply been a misunderstanding involving a university student who was carrying material used in dentistry. He said it wasn’t radioactive.
Russian Customs officers found “18 industrially produced metal items individually wrapped in steel containers” in the passenger’s luggage, the Federal Customs Service said on its website. Sodium-22 doesn’t occur naturally and must be produced in cyclotron facilities, according to the customs service.
There are between 600 and 800 seizures of radioactive substances each year in Russia, either of contaminated materials or items that weren’t properly declared, Elena Sokova, executive director at the Vienna-based Center for Disarmament Non- Proliferation, told Bloomberg. “It just raises flags because it’s Iran,” she said.
“The radioactive isotope itself is something that is used for medical purposes, in tomography machines,” Sokova said. “It’s not something that is suitable for a military program.”