MOSCOW, January 25: Russian radioactive waste bears all kinds of dangers, as ex-naval sea captain-turned-journalist Grigory Pasko found.Last week, Capt Pasko was ordered to be detained again for two months on suspicion of spying for Japan. Pasko, arrested in November on returning from a trip to Tokyo, is a columnist and editor at the Russian navy's Pacific fleet newspaper Boyevaya Vakhta (Combat Readiness).He is also the man who brought Russia into global disrepute when he filmed a Russian tanker dumping some of the 800 tonnes of low-level nuclear waste from dismantled nuclear-powered submarines that the Russian navy spilled into the sea of Japan in October 1993.His worldwide scoop, on behalf of Japanese NHK TV, caused a political outcry in Japan. Russia found itself in a diplomatic crisis and Tokyo was forced to provide aid for a waste processing plant in Russia.But Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the renamed Soviet era KGB, never forgot. Last November, they arrested Capt Pasko in Vladivostok, claiming that customs officers had found ``confidential documents'' on Russian naval facilities in his baggage as he left for Japan. The arrest and the scandalised complaints came just as Russia and Japan were marking a major breakthrough in relations.Even as Capt Pasko was being arrested, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto were meeting in Krasnoyarsk to agree on a peace treaty by the year 2000 (the two countries technically never made peace after World War II) and vowed to boost economic, military and diplomatic cooperation.General Viktor Kondratov, head of the local branch of FSB in the Russian Far East, denied that Capt Pasko's arrest had anything to do with his environmental investigations. ``It (the arrest) deals with Russia's state secrets,'' Gen Kondratov said.Capt Pasko's lawyers appealed against his detention, saying the charges were the navy's way of retaliating against Capt Pasko for exposing the environmental damage inflicted by the Pacific Fleet. They said his arrest was meant to silence the critics of the Russian Pacific fleet's appalling environment record.``It's worrying that a recent arrest of journalist Grigory Pasko could probably become another Nikitin case,'' said Diederik Lohman of the NGO Human Rights Watch, in Moscow.Former Soviet navy captain Alexander Nikitin contributed to a Norwegian NGO's report on the environmental threat posed by insecure storage of radioactive waste by the Russian northern fleet, based in ports in the Barents sea. When the report was published by the Oslo-based Bellona Foundation, the FSB arrested Nikitin and charged him with treason for leaking state secrets.Nikitin spent almost a year in jail before Russian authorities bowed to international pressure and released him in December 1996. ``The arrest was a surprise for me, because I worked on my report in contact with local authorities and naval commanders,'' Nikitin said.Nikitin repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, saying he collected theinformation from press reports, but FSB still pressed accusations.
