Mysterious 'Swedish' Men Held in Nuke Plant Scare; One Has a Record

Authorities are now disclosing that the two mystery men behind today's suspected sabotage attempt at a nuclear power plant are Swedish citizens, but no media accounts disclose the names of the pair.

This account says they are maintenance workers.

Swedish police arrested two maintenance workers on suspicion of plotting sabotage after they tried to enter a nuclear power plant Wednesday with traces of a powerful explosive like that used in the 2005 London transit bombings, officials said.

The plant's operator, OKG, said no bomb was found and the incident did not pose a threat to the Oskarshamn generating station, which provides 10 percent of Sweden's electricity.

Experts said a bagful of the suspected explosive would not be powerful enough to damage a nuclear reactor but could wreak havoc in a power plant's control room.

Police with bomb-sniffing dogs searched the plant 150 miles south of Stockholm and were examining a substance detected on a plastic bag carried by one of the workers. It was believed to be triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, which is extremely dangerous even in tiny amounts.

"It's not something you use at home," Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for plant operator OKG, told The Associated Press. "We're not dealing with toys here."

The two men were contractors hired to do maintenance work on one of the facility's three reactors, which was shut down May 11 for an annual check, plant spokesman Roger Bergman said.

It goes on to say there are Swedish citizens and one is "known to police."

Police did not release the men's identities, saying only that one was born in 1955 and the other in 1962 and both were Swedish citizens. The older suspect was "known to police" from prior investigations, police spokesman Sven-Erik Karlsson told AP, but he declined to give details.

Here it says they were contracted welders.

A spokesman for the OKG company that runs the plant, Anders Oesterberg, told AFP the two were welders who had been contracted for work on one of the plant's three reactors, which had been shut down for maintenance.

He said one of them had been working inside the plant for two weeks, and that sniffer dogs would be sent in to search the area they had worked in.

"One must of course take into account the information we have about where these people have been working ... and in cooperation with the police and bomb sniffing dogs search these areas to make sure these people have not left behind any explosives," the police spokesman added.

Of course, it certainly isn't beneath al Qaeda to recruit Westerners to do their dirty work.

Hopefully the authorities there get to the bottom of today's events and let us know who may have been behind this if it indeed was something sinister.