The informant said it contained “nuclear” material. The BBC reports that officials said it would be tested for radioactivity. Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact and alongside it were a number of yellow barrels. Labels on them say the contents are toxic.

The informant said the mafia had muscled in on the lucrative business of radioactive waste disposal. He said that instead of getting rid of the material safely, he blew up the vessel out at sea, off the Calabrian coast. He also said he was responsible for sinking two other ships containing toxic waste.

Experts were now examining samples taken from the wreck. An official said that if the samples proved to be radioactive then a search for up to thirty other sunken vessels believed scuttled by the mafia would be launched.

For years there have been rumors that the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other waste on board, as part of a money-making racket. The environmental campaign group Greenpeace and others have compiled lists over the past few decades of ships that have disappeared off the coast of Italy and Greece.

Cobalt-60 as the first nuclear “dirty bomb”

Cobalt-60 was the material of choice for countries that wanted to have a nuclear weapons capacity but did not have the technological know-how to build nuclear bombs. In the early 1960s, Egypt’s president Gamal Abed el Nasser recruited a few dozen former Nazi scientists and brought them to Egypt to build what was then called “cobalt bombs” and the missiles to carry them. Naser’s knew Egypt was not in a position to build a nuclear bomb, but he thought that showering Israeli urban centers with radioactive cobalt — in effect, dirty bombs — would be enough to kill a few hundreds of thousands Israelis and put an end to Israel.

In response, the Mossad, Israel’s secret service, began a three-year campaign of intimidation and threats — and more — against these scientists after Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s chancellor, refused to ban their employment in Egypt’s weapon industry (in any event, soon other European scientists joined the initial group of Germans). The Mossad campaign ranged from “friendly” visits to the scientists and their families to pressure them to leave Egypt, to letter bombs which killed some of the scientists (and, in a few cases, the local office staff), to more direct assassinations. The campaign was exposed in mid-1963 when two Mossad agents were captured in a Swiss hotel, where they were holding the family of a Swiss missile scientist, threatening to kill the wife and kids unless the scientist returned from Egypt.

Israel went to extremes to achieve its goal. For example, it employed Otto Skorzeni, a decorated officer of the special commando units of the Nazi Waffen SS, to obtain information about Germans doing work in Egypt. Skorzeni, who led the Fallschirmjäger unit which rescued Benito Mussolini from Italian anti-Fascist fighters on 12 September 1943, was entnazifiziert (denazified) in absentia in 1952 by the West German government. Still, before agreeing to cooperate with the Mossad, Skorzeni insisted on a written agreement hat he would not be kidnapped and brought to trial in Israel as was the case with Adolph Eichmann, who was captured by Mossad operatives in Argentina on 11 May 1960.

Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire