NEW YORK — The purported chief of a Japan-based crime syndicate pleaded responsible Wednesday to expenses alleging that he conspired to visitors uranium and plutonium from Myanmar within the perception that Iran would use it for nuclear weapons.
Takeshi Ebisawa, 60, of Japan, entered the plea in Manhattan federal courtroom to weapons and narcotics trafficking expenses that carry a compulsory minimal of 10 years in jail and the potential of life behind bars. Sentencing was set for April 9.
Prosecutors say Ebisawa did not know he was speaking in 2021 and 2022 with a confidential supply for the Drug Enforcement Administration together with the supply’s affiliate, who posed as an Iranian common. Ebisawa was arrested in April 2022 in Manhattan throughout a DEA sting.
DEA Administrator Anne Milgram mentioned in a launch that the prosecution demonstrated the DEA’s “unparalleled ability to dismantle the world’s most dangerous criminal networks.”
She mentioned the investigation “exposed the shocking depths of international organized crime from trafficking nuclear materials to fueling the narcotics trade and arming violent insurgents.”
Performing U.S. Lawyer Edward Y. Kim mentioned Ebisawa admitted at his plea that he “brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma.”
“At the same time, he worked to send massive quantities of heroin and methamphetamine to the United States in exchange for heavy-duty weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles to be used on battlefields in Burma,” he added.
Court docket papers mentioned Ebisawa advised the DEA’s confidential supply in 2020 that he had entry to a big amount of nuclear supplies that he wished to promote. To assist his declare, he despatched the supply images depicting rocky substances with Geiger counters measuring radiation, claiming they contained thorium and uranium, the papers mentioned.
The nuclear materials got here from an unidentified chief of an “ethnic insurgent group” in Myanmar who had been mining uranium within the nation, prosecutors mentioned. Ebisawa had proposed that the chief promote uranium by means of him in an effort to fund a weapons buy from the final, courtroom paperwork allege.
Prosecutors mentioned samples of the alleged nuclear supplies have been obtained and a U.S. federal lab discovered they contained uranium, thorium and plutonium, and that the “the isotope composition of the plutonium” was weapons-grade, which means sufficient of it will be appropriate to be used in a nuclear weapon.
An e-mail searching for remark was despatched to Ebisawa’s attorneys.
