An alleged leader from Japan’s Yakuza crime syndicates has pleaded guilty to trafficking nuclear materials from Myanmar as part of a global web of trades in drugs, weapons and laundered cash.

Axar.az reports that this information was provided by the US Department of Justice.

During an undercover investigation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in 2021, Takeshi Ebisawa tried to sell the materials – including uranium and weapons-grade plutonium – to someone he believed was an Iranian general who wanted them for a nuclear weapons program, the department said in a statement.

In 2021, Ebisawa told an undercover DEA agent that an unnamed leader of an insurgent group in Myanmar, the country formerly known as Burma, could sell nuclear material through Ebisawa to the fictitious Iranian general, to fund a large weapons purchase, the indictment says.

A year later, US authorities arrested Ebisawa on charges of plotting to distribute drugs in the United States and purchase American-made surface-to-air missiles. Early last year he was also hit with charges over the purported Iranian sale.