Myanmar is working on a nuclear weapons programme, a media report has said, citing expert opinion on leaked photographs.
Fears that the country's military junta had joined a clandestine nuclear network linking North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and Syria have been growing for some time, but there has been no hard evidence until now.
Now, secret documents and hundreds of photographs smuggled out of Myanmar by a defector indicated that it was intent on developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reported.
Army Major Sai Thein Win, the defector, has claimed that he had access to two secret nuclear facilities, including a 'nuclear battalion' north of Mandalay, "charged with building up a nuclear weapons capability".
Even 'Jane's Intelligence Review' published a separate batch of photographs showing similar activities in buildings and behind security fences near the capital, Naypyidaw.
Expert Robert Kelley, an American former senior weapons inspector with the International Atomic Energy Agency, said the evidence was the most compelling yet.
The photographs, which were passed to the Democratic Voice of Burma, part of the Burmese opposition, clearly showed components built with German machine tools imported through Singapore, which he believed indicated 'nefarious purposes'.
They included a fluidised bed reactor which is used to turn a powdered form of uranium into a gas which can then be enriched to weapons grade.
"They are either trying to make reactor fuel which they could buy for nothing from another country, or they are trying to make a weapon clandestinely. There is just not much point doing that unless it is for a bomb," Kelley said.
However, the Burmese government has dismissed the latest claims as 'accusations based solely on the fabrications of deserters, fugitives and exiles'.
