Kazakh warns Russian tests of biochemical weapons endanger mainland

MOSCOW [MENL] -- A top Kazakhstani scientist warned Tuesday that Russia is secretly testing biological and toxin weapons on the desolate Vozrozhdeniye island test site in the Aral Sea.

The island is shared between Kazakhstan and its southern neighbour Uzbekistan.

Dastan Yeleukenov, executive director for newly independent states at the Monteret Institute of International Studies, a centre for weapons non-proliferation research said that there is a danger that virulent disease strains -- anthrax, tularaemia, brucellosis, plague, typhus and smallpox -- being tested by the Russians, may spread to the mainland.

A range of aerosol bomblets and extremely deadly strains of diseases were tested on the island on several kinds of animals, including monkeys because they came closest to simulating how the human body would react.

Environmental experts say that the island, which continues to expand as the sea rapidly dries up, could reach the mainland by 2010.

Yeleukenov said most scientists agree that the harsh climate on the remote island is likely to have killed off microbes and other agents tested as recently as the 1980s. But scientists agree that a threat still exists.

Moscow signed the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, aimed at developing the strongest destructive materials possible.

In a study he conducted on biological weapons in the region, Yeleukenov wrote that several cases of flea-borne bubonic plague, including one fatal one have been reported in the Kazakh regions around the Aral Sea this year, although scientists are not linking them to the test site.

Yeleunov and other specialists said the Kazakh authorities have been in contact with Pentagon officials in an efffort to launch a joint project to carry out experiments and assess the risks.