"I demand that an official inquiry commission come to investigate this affair of Congolese uranium," the governor of the southeastern Katanga province Urbain Ngoy Kisula said in a statement.

Katanga is home to the country's only uranium reserves, the Shinkolobwe mines.

Congolese judicial authorities are responsible for any decision on a demand for such an inquiry.

Kisula also said certain police and army officers should be suspended, claiming that "many indications" implicated them in the alleged uranium exports. He did not name the officers and the army declined to comment when contacted by AFP.

The governor's call followed a report earlier this month in Britain's Sunday Times newspaper that Tanzanian custom officials in October 2005 had seized a large shipment of Congolese uranium bound for the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas.

The DRC and Iran have both denied the allegation -- a sensitive charge in light of a recent UN resolution demanding that Iran halt uranium enrichment amid fears the Islamic republic is seeking to build nuclear weapons.

Iran said it did not need to import uranium since it had its own mines and processing plant. The Congolese government said Shinkolobwe was officially closed and the country did not have the capacity to treat uranium.

However, The Sunday Times cited a United Nations report which said there was "no doubt" that a large shipment of the uranium isotope 238 was transported from the Congolese mines.

Despite its official closure in the 1960s, thousands of people are reported to carry out illegal digging at the Shinkolobwe mines, selling the uranium to local dealers.

"These (dealers) pay modest sums to young people who indulge in illegal exploitation of minerals... including uranium, intended for export," a source close to the Katanga authorities told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Shinkolobwe produced the uranium used to make the bombs that destroyed the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

bbos-bed/rlp/boc

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.