Moscow, 1 January: More than 850 cases of illegal transportation of good with high levels of radioactivity were uncovered on the Russian customs border last year, deputy chief of the main directorate for information technology of the Russian Federal Customs Service Nikolay Kravchenko has said.

"In 2007, the equipment that spots excessive radiation in luggage at customs borders went off more than 65,000 times. In 850 cases, customs officials found that goods with a high level of ionizing radiation were being illegally transported across the border of the Russian Federation," Kravchenko told journalists.

He said that 85 per cent of these cases involved attempts to bring goods into Russia while attempts to smuggle radioactive materials out of Russia accounted for only 15 per cent.

"If we take the situation with polonium-210, industrial shipments of this substance are being exported from Russia absolutely legally. Moreover, Russia is far from the only country to export substances of this kind," Kravchenko said.

"One hears very often that Russia does not monitor the movement of radioactive isotopes sufficiently well. And yet this is not the case. In reality, Russia is the only country in the world where declared radioactive goods are searched and checked with special equipment, so our equipment makes it possible to spot any mismatch between the actual contents of the container and what is declared on paper in the case of legal transportation of radioactive materials," Kravchenko said. He also pointed out that polonium-210 poses a threat not as a radioactive element but as a highly toxic substance.

"A very small quantity of polonium is enough to inflict irreparable damage on a person's health, and moreover such small doses cannot be detected by any devices which react to radiation. It can only be done though chemical analysis," he stressed.

Kravchenko said that Russian-made special monitoring systems made it possible to detect radiation higher than the background level with such precision that they even react to a person who has undergone medical examination with the use of isotopes.

The Federal Customs Service spokesman said the plan was to equip all customs post in the Russian Federation with these systems before 2010.