A team of Pentagon arms control experts is being sent to East Africa to
warn of growing threats that al-Qaeda could make biological weapons with
deadly germs stolen from insecure laboratories.

Richard Lugar, the Republican senator: US sends team to East Africa to
crack down on 'germ terrorism' threat

The Pentagon arms control experts team includes US Senator Richard
Lugar, who spearheaded programmes to destroy the former Soviet Union's
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons after 1991 Photo: AP

By Mike Pflanz in Nairobi 9:00PM GMT 09 Nov 2010

The panel, including Kenneth Myers, the director of the Pentagon's
Threat Reduction Agency, will inspect facilities in Kenya and Uganda
where some of the world's most infectious diseases are stored and studied.

Defence analysts are increasingly concerned that the laboratories'
security is too weak to withstand the increasing threat from regional
terror groups, including al-Qaeda, who are hunting for ingredients for
biological weapons.

The team includes Richard Lugar, the Republican senator who spearheaded
programmes to destroy the former Soviet Union's nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons after 1991.

Meetings are planned with senior officials from the Kenyan and Ugandan
governments to warn of the growing threat of bioterrorism, and to advise
on stronger security systems.

"This is urgent work," said Sen Lugar, former chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.

"A number of African nations with active terrorist cells have unsecured
facilities that are tracking and sometimes handling some of the
deadliest pathogens on Earth, including Ebola, Marburg, Rift Valley
Fever and plague.

"These can be made into horrible weapons aimed at our troops, our
friends and allies, and even the American public. This is a threat we
cannot ignore."

Research laboratories in Africa often lack basic security systems and
diseases kept to be studied can be poorly stored and catalogued, meaning
thefts would be almost impossible to detect or quantify.

"African nations do not have the surveillance, detection, diagnosis, and
reporting capacities to deal with the potential for global
bioterrorism," Sen Lugar said.

Details of the visit, scheduled to start on Tuesday, have not been
released. A spokesman for Kenya's government did not comment, apart from
to say the team would be "welcomed" and assisted wherever necessary.
Uganda's government spokesman could not be reached.

Sen Lugar co-directed the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction
programme, set up in 1991 as the Soviet Union collapsed, which has since
helped remove all nuclear weapons from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Investigators found that Soviet scientists had used African diseases to
make biological weapons during the Cold War.

"Those weapons are being destroyed," said Sen Lugar. "Now we have to
secure their sources." But the threat from chemical warfare is now very
different, the Indiana Senator told a conference on science and
international security in Madrid on Monday.

"The footprint of weapons-producing laboratories and the size of today's
"strategic" weapons grow smaller every day," he said.

"A delivery system may be as mundane as a commercial cargo carrier. In
the case of infectious pathogens, the delivery system could be an
individual human being.

Discovering potential WMD threats is far more challenging."

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