Sunday, 29 September , an unidentified Turkish police official at Diyarbakir “amended” the first announcement that paramilitary police had captured 15 kg of enriched uranium hidden in a taxicab driving through the southern province of Sanliurfa (incidentally Abraham’s Biblical birthplace of Ur). He claimed that the quantity of radioactive material was only 140 grams. 
DEBKAfile ’s sources comment that the quantity is less relevant than the tangible evidence of a free route along which weapons-grade uranium is being smuggled from points in East Europe and Central Asia to the Middle East. There is no knowing what quantities have already traveled that route. Last November, for instance, the Istanbul police caught 1kg of enriched uranium on the black market.
Only hours after the first Turkish announcement on Saturday, the International Atomic Energy Agency in Viennawas playing it down. A spokesman questioned the contents of the lead container because the word uranium was spelled in “a strange way”.  Bureaucratic fudging? Or an echo in Vienna from the New York office of UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who has made no secret of his opposition to unilateral American military action against Iraq un-sponsored by the world body. 
The word from Washington Sunday night was that the White House is seeking more information before determining its position. 
28 September: The mysterious tip-off that led Turkish paramilitary police to the taxi cab, transporting 33 lbs of enriched uranium in a lead container hidden under a seat, came from the joint US-Russian undercover team that has for five weeks been tracking Iraqi operatives who were sent by the Iraqi ruler to hunt for the essential ingredient in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. The news released Saturday, September 28, does not say when the seizure took place. 
This joint team, working out of Moscow, was first uncovered by DEBKA-Net-Weekly Issue 74 on August 23: 
Operatives of the American and the Russian SVR secret services are jointly engaged in an epic hunt for a band of undercover Iraqi operatives racing up and down Russia, Belarus, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan this past week. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s exclusive sources, the Iraqis have been sent by Saddam Hussein on an illicit hunt for nuclear material, particularly weapons-grade enriched Uranium-235. They are also trying to buy black market missile parts.
American and Russian task forces have set up a joint command center in Moscow to coordinate the high-stakes chase.
The alarm was first sounded in Washington and Moscow in early August by reports of Iraq agents splashing out with multi-million dollar offers for nuclear material. They did not take the information too seriously at first. But then came further reports that 15 Iraqi agents had split up into three groups, two covering Kazakhstan and the Ukraine and the third, Belarus.
The American and Russian presidents put their heads together and decided their intelligence operational divisions would mount a hot pursuit of the Iraqi agents, hoping to get to them before they reached their objective.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources say the chase is still on.
The haul in the southern Turkish province of Sanliurfia, which borders on Syria, may have given President George W. Bush the conclusive evidence he needs to prove that Saddam Hussein is racing to build up a nuclear warfare capability and may use it in the approaching war. It may be the clincher in Washington’s bid for support at home and abroad in its decision to use military force against Iraq. 
On Saturday, American and British representatives, having been rejected by France, arrived in Moscow to win the Russians round to Washington’s case against Saddam Hussein. 
There is little doubt that the Turkish smugglers who had been promised $5 million for the uranium were on their way to the Syrian or Iraqi borders to hand it over to their Iraqi clients.
Despite the US-Russian success in tracking down one shipment of enriched uranium sufficient for the fabrication of several small bombs, there is no knowing for certain if previous consignments have not got through to destination and were already being processed. 
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Arafat-Saddam-Bin Laden Links Surface
DEBKAfile Expose 
24 September:   DEBKAfile ’s readers were not taken aback by the Israeli Shin Beit’s (Security Service) disclosure on September 23 that it had custody of a three-man Palestinian cell from Ramallah who trained in Iraq with Iraqi instructors in the execution of strikes against Israeli targets - in the company of al Qaeda terrorists.  
Their admissions - which link Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in a collaborative relationship for the pursuit of terror – were included in a sensitive file carried to Washington this week by a team of Israeli officers.
DEBKAfile pointed attention to this association right after the Passover massacre at the Park Hotel in Netanya on March 27, 2002. Three months earlier, in January 2002, we highlighted  secret rendezvous taking place regularly in Amman between two childhood friends: Col. Tawfiq Tirawi, chief of West Bank General Intelligence and one of Arafat’s most trusted aides, and another Palestinian terror executive, Mohammad Abbas, known as Abu al-Abbas, head of the Baghdad-based Arab Liberation Front. The two men were born and went to school in the village of Tirah north of Ramallah. From 1991, they have been meeting regularly in Amman, which is halfway between the West Bank and Baghdad, to trade directives, intelligence, funds and messages between their respective bosses. 
Abu al-Abbas is better known for hijacking the Achille Lauro pleasure craft in 1985 in an operation ordered by Arafat and throwing the American Jewish Leon Klinghoffer overboard in his wheelchair.
Tirawi’s importance to Arafat is such that is willing to see his government compound in ruins rather than hand his senior aide over with his pockets full of incriminating secrets.
According to DEBKAfile’s military and counter-terror sources, the Israeli officers brought to Washington two further pieces of information:
1.  The interrogations of Palestinian and Iraqi terrorists and agents picked up in recent weeks in the West Bank, at the Jordan Bridges crossings from Jordan and in Jordan itself, yielded the discovery that Yasser Arafat’s hand was behind the assassination in Baghdad on August 16 of the terror master Abu Nidal, his notorious former partner turned rival, with four of his aides.  Indeed, Tirawi and Abu al-Abbas were entrusted with setting up the murder. Arafat asked Saddam Hussein to get rid of Abu Nidal, claiming he was on the point of passing to American parties in the Persian Gulf evidence of the three-way partnership-for-terror forged by Arafat, Saddam and bin Laden. Arafat relayed his request to the Iraqi leader through Ahmed Azzam, Arafat’s special envoy to Baghdad, together with Al-Abbas.
Saddam gave his assent at the beginning of August. The plan of operation entailed Abu Nidal’s regular contacts in Iraqi intelligence calling on him and, when he opened the door unsuspectingly, standing aside for the Palestinians to burst in and do the deed..
2.  The second piece of information relayed to Washington exposes another hidden facet of the working relationship binding Arafat and his PLO with Saddam and al Qaida. That facet surfaced after Italy seized a ship on August 5, carrying a suspected al Qaeda cell of 15 Pakistanis. The ship’s smudged name appeared to be “Sara”. The Pakistanis were detained in Sicily after US naval intelligence deciphered coded messages and gathered evidence on some of the men. One coded note used the expression “united in matrimony”, which was similar to a reference intercepted during the first attack on New York’s TwinTowers in 1993. 
DEBKAfile ’s counter-terror sources reveal exclusively one of the most telling discoveries of the Italian investigation: The “Sara” was owned by the same shipper as the Karine-A, the freighter captured by Israel last January with 50 tonnes of arms bound for the Palestinian Authority. Both vessels were also purchased by the same Palestinian-Iraqi company; the Palestinians negotiated the purchase with money put up by Iraq. Both ships flew the Tongan flag of convenience.
Whereas the Karine-A carried a cargo of contraband weapons provided by Iran, the Sara carried a suspected al Qaeda terrorist cell.
Arafat may protest he is innocent of terrorist activities and make a show of demanding a halt to terror. However, ample evidence continues to pile up demonstrating his hand in violence not only against Israel, but also in al Qaeda’s global terror campaign and Iraq’s machinations against the United States.