A Japanese crime lord has been charged with smuggling weapons- grade nuclear material sourced to Myanmar, raising questions how such material was available in a non-nuclear nation on the vortex of a bleeding civil war.

US federal prosecutors on Wednesday unsealed an indictment against Takeshi Ebisawa, alleging he was a leader of the Japanese organized crime syndicate Yakuza and charging him with offering to weapons-grade nuclear materials to someone he thought was an Iranian general but one who turned out to be an US federal agent.

Ebisawa, 60, was already charged with drug and weapons trafficking by the US, in April 2022. He was expected to face an American judge on Thursday, alongside his alleged co-conspirator, 61-year-old Somphop Singhasiri.

According to prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, Ebisawa was a “leader within the Yakuza transnational organized crime syndicate” and contacted a person he believed to be an Iranian general in early 2020, with an offer to sell him nuclear weapons components. In return, he sought to buy weapons for an “ethnic insurgent........

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