Police said on Wednesday they were interrogating a man who had entered a nuclear plant on Sweden’s south-east coast carrying highly explosive material.
Sven-Erik Karlsson, spokesperson for Kalmar County Police, said police received a call from the Oskarshamn plant at 7.58am local time.
”They told us a welder who was going to perform a job there had been stopped in a random security check. He had been carrying small amounts of the highly explosive material, TATP,” Karlsson said.
TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, is a high explosive that is extremely unstable, especially when subjected to heat, friction and shock.
The compound can be prepared in a home laboratory from easily available household chemicals. It has been employed by suicide bombers in Israel and by Richard Reid, the thwarted British ”shoe-bomber” who attempted to blow up a transatlantic airliner in 2001.
”The man has been brought to Kalmar for interrogation,” the police spokesperson said. ”The substance has been sealed off at the plant with a 300m perimeter.”
Oskarshamn is jointly owned by Germany’s E.ON and Finland’s Fortum. An E.ON spokesperson said traces of explosives had been found on the man.
”What has happened is that a guy, a contractor, this morning [Wednesday] came to the security check with a bag on which, or in which, there were traces of explosives,” E.ON spokesperson Johan Aspegren said.
Oskarshamn said in a statement on its website that it believed the reactor’s safety was never threatened.
Police spokesperson Karlsson said the man has not yet been formally classified as a suspect. He added that bomb technicians had been called in from Malmo, the largest city nearby.
State energy firm Vattenfall, which does not run the Oskarshamn nuclear plant but is the main nuclear supplier in Sweden, earlier said it had received word of a scare at the plant.
The police official added he was unaware of any incidents involving other Swedish power plants.
Oskarshamn is one of three nuclear plants in Sweden that meet half the country’s power needs. Joint owner Fortum was not immediately available for comment. — Reuters