By Joe Bavier KINSHASA, March 7 (Reuters) - Democratic Republic of Congo's top nuclear research official has been arrested, the government said on Wednesday, after a Kinshasa newspaper reported uranium had gone missing from an atomic institute in the city. "We have been informed that he has been arrested," said Godefoid Mayobo, minister in the Prime Minister's office and government spokesman. "We are waiting for the results of the inquiry. We are not aware of the details." He did not say why Professor Fortunat Lumu, Commissioner General for Atomic Energy, was arrested. Kinshasa's Le Phare newspaper reported on Wednesday two senior officials had been detained after the disappearance of around 100 bars of uranium from the city's Regional Centre for Atomic Energy. The centre houses a small, inactive research reactor on a university campus. Last year diplomatic and intelligence sources told Reuters that countries suspected of seeking nuclear arms might have exploited lax security in Congo 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. A new government has just taken over in Congo after an election last year intended to end years of violence in which an estimated 4 million people have been killed.
