Russia dismissed as scaremongering a claim by exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky that Chechen rebels had a nuclear bomb. Berezovsky, who lives in London but has close links with Chechen rebels after serving as a negotiator between the Kremlin and militants in the late 1990s, told a Russian newspaper on Tuesday that the rebels possessed a portable nuclear device. "Moscow does not believe in the presence of such a nuclear device with the Chechen rebels, nor, correspondingly, in the possibility of using it to carry out a terrorist act," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
"We do not exclude that there will be yet more of this "scaremongering", the aim of which is to sow in Russia a mood of vulnerability and nervousness."
In an interview published in Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, Berezovsky said "trusted people" had told him about the bomb.
"It is a portable nuclear (bomb). Some part of it is missing at the moment, but these are small details," he said. "I wrote a letter to the FSB (Security Service) in autumn about this."
He told Ekho Moskvy radio that Chechens had told him about the bomb two-and-a-half years ago.
"I was told that it was possible to buy the device, a price was even named," he told the radio. "I was also told that the device could be delivered to any part of Europe or Russia."
Experts said such a device would have been stolen around the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and was unlikely to be in working order.
"Even if such a device exists, it is impossible to modernise it and make it battle-ready in the field or abroad," Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Centre for Strategic and Technological Analysis, told Ekho Moskvy.
"The likelihood of this device, if it exists, of exploding is precisely zero."
Berezovsky's Kommersant newspaper published an interview on Monday with separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov in which he called for peace talks with Moscow. Government officials were angry with the paper for "publishing an interview with a bandit".
Last week, Maskhadov ordered a cease-fire by his forces in what he called a gesture of goodwill aimed at ending the decade-long conflict in the North Caucasus region.
The Kremlin has yet to respond, although leaders of the region's pro-Moscow government have branded the move a cynical ploy to buy time while the rebels regroup.
The Foreign Ministry said Berezovsky's nuclear bomb claim aimed to frighten people in the same way that a British Channel 4 News interview with Chechen guerrilla commander Shamil Basayev had last week.
Russia tried to block the broadcast in which Basayev said rebels were planning more attacks like the Beslan school hostage-taking that killed more than 330 people - half of them children - last year.
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