MOSCOW — Russia’s customs agency announced Friday it had seized pieces of radioactive metal from the luggage of an Iranian passenger bound for Tehran from Moscow’s main airport.

It was not immediately clear if the substance could be any use to Iran’s controversial nuclear program.

Federal Customs Service agents found 18 pieces of metal at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport after a radiation alert went off, the agency said in a statement. It said the gauges showed that radiation levels were 20 times higher than normal.

Spokeswoman Kseniya Grebenkina told The Associated Press the luggage was seized some time ago, but did not specify when. The Iranian wasn’t detained, she said, and it was not clear whether he was still in Russia or not. She did not give his name.

The pieces contained Sodium-22, she said, a radioactive isotope of sodium that could be produced in a particle accelerator. Sodium-22 is a positron-emitting isotope that has medical uses, including in nuclear medicine imaging.

Grebenkina said prosecutors have launched a probe into the incident but insisted that the material seized is not highly radioactive.

The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out a military option against Iran’s controversial nuclear program, which the West suspects is aimed at making atomic weapons. Iran denies the charge, saying its program is geared toward generating electricity and producing medical radioisotopes to treat cancer patients.

Last month, the U.S. and its western allies bluntly accused Iran of deceiving the world by trying to hide work on nuclear arms, and the U.N. atomic agency passed a new resolution criticizing Tehran’s nuclear defiance.

Sergei Novikov, spokesman for Russia’s Rosatom nuclear agency, told the AP that the pieces seized at Moscow airport are highly unlikely to have come from Rosatom and said the isotope is produced by particle accelerators, not by nuclear reactors.

In Russia, universities, research institutes and big medical centers have the technology to produce it, he said.

“There is an extremely slim chance that it could have come from Rosatom,” he said.

Novikov said Rosatom has never sold Sodium-22 to Iran, but it has supplied Iran with other types of medical isotopes.

James Adelstein, a professor of medical biophysics at Harvard Medical School, told the AP “the fact that it’s in bars bothers me” because its “a funny way” to use Sodium-22.

“I’d be a little suspicious that this was primarily used for medical purposes,” he said Friday in a phone interview.

Earlier this year, Atomstroiexport, a Rosatom subsidiary, launched Iran’s first nuclear reactor in Bushehr. Russian officials have insisted the deal is in line with international agreements and will oblige Tehran to ship all the spent fuel from the plant back to Russia for reprocessing to avoid a possibility of it being used in a covert weapons program.

The U.S. House of Representatives, meanwhile, endorsed harsher sanctions Wednesday against Iran aimed at derailing its suspected pursuit of nuclear weapons.
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