Radioactive Paint Found in Bosnian Parliament

For more than 15 years, hundreds of litres of radioactive paint was on ground floor of the Bosnian parliament.

Hundreds of litres of radioactive paint spent more than 15 years on the ground floor of the parliament building in Bosnia Herzegovina. The pigment was from a Russian manufacturer and was discovered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from Vienna, as a part of the project that they were working on in Bosnia Herzegovina.

Few people knew that paint was in the storage rooms, because everything was written in a foreign language.

The Bosnian Army, members of the first corpus and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who were on the front lines when Grbavica was occupied, took the paint and painted apartments and façades with it. They also distributed the paint to other people to paint internal rooms, because the paint was allegedly very good, said a former member of the Bosnian Army from Sarajevo for Vecernji List. Only in 1999 did he find out what was in question, and investigated it, and found out that many soldiers died from various diseases.

The IAEA’s report states that the inside of the storage room became contaminatred, as that radiation could be measured inside as well as around the room, and everybody could come into contact with the barrels. There was a serious risk of leakage, or spreading the radioactivity into the environment.

In 1998 the IAEA gave special stainless steel containers to the federal department for public health, as well as equipment for transporting dangerous materials, and the room that was a storage room was decontaminated and sealed. The barrels were relocated outside the city to a secure location, according to the IAEA report.