By Joe Bavier

KINSHASA, March 8 (Reuters) - A government minister in Congo on Thursday accused the country's top nuclear research official, arrested earlier this week, of belonging to an international network set up to mine and export uranium illegally.

Professor Fortunat Lumu, Commissioner General for Atomic Energy in Democratic Republic of Congo, was arrested this week with another official after a Kinshasa newspaper reported that uranium had gone missing from an atomic institute in the city.

Minister of Scientific Research Sylvanus Mushi, who was recently appointed to Congo's new government, said Lumu and a colleague had illegally negotiated partnership deals with foreign companies without proper government authorisation.

"It was a group of people coming from all over the world, from Europe, from South Africa, from the Seychelles, who completely ignored Congolese authority and law with the goal of getting their hands on very sensitive material: uranium and other radioactive minerals," he told reporters.

"It was a criminal network," said Mushi, whose ministry oversees the Regional Centre for Atomic Energy where Lumu works.

Officials at the centre -- which houses a small inactive reactor on a university campus -- declined to comment and referred all questions to the minister.

Kinshasa's Le Phare newspaper reported on Wednesday that two senior officials had been detained after the disappearance of around 100 bars of uranium from the centre.

Mushi was sceptical about the details of that report and said foreign diplomats had visited the site on Wednesday.

"We'll verify but you should know that there is no uranium stocked at the centre," he said. "If there is uranium over there it is for research."

Last year diplomatic and intelligence sources told Reuters countries suspected of seeking nuclear arms might have exploited lax security in the former Belgian colony to obtain uranium.

Congo's Shinkolobwe mine provided high-quality uranium for the Manhattan Project, the secret U.S. programme that produced the two atomic weapons dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War Two.

When Congo was granted independence in 1960, Belgium sealed the Shinkolobwe mine by filling its shafts with concrete. At the time the mine was shut, Congo supplied 60 percent of the world's uranium, according to the security website Globalsecurity.org.

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