Libya’s military said late Thursday they found 2.5 tons of natural uranium that the International Atomic Energy Agency said was missing from a previously declared site in southern Libya. The 10 drums containing the uranium ore, known as yellowcake, were found near Libya’s border with Chad, General Khaled al-Mahjoub, a commander of the Libyan National Army, said on his Facebook page, which noted that the containers of uranium had been recovered “barely 5 kilometers (3 miles)” from where they had been stored in the Sabha area of southern Libya, a previously declared nuclear site.
The location is routinely monitored by the IAEA through commercial satellite imagery and other open-source information. The IAEA has said that the area is difficult for its inspectors to reach, and an on-site inspection scheduled for 2022 had been postponed because of violence in the region.
The stockpile was originally part of dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s secret weapons program, with estimates suggesting that it totaled approximately 1,000 metric tons of yellowcake uranium. While enriched uranium was removed from Libya in 2009, the yellowcake was left behind, and approximately 6,400 barrels of it were said to have been stored at Sabha by the UN in 2013. Sabha has grown increasingly lawless since the 2011 Arab Spring and is largely under the control of the Libyan National Army, led by General Khalifa Hifter.