Vienna: The UN nuclear watchdog`s chief
inspector briefed member states on Thursday on his recent trips to
Iran with satellite images showing unspecified "activities" at
the Parchin military site, diplomats said.
But Herman Nackaerts` three-hour presentation did not
include images showing conclusively that the Islamic republic
was cleaning up the site near Tehran, where the agency
suspects it carried out explosives tests, the diplomats said.
"One has to be concerned if they are actually doing any
clean-up there, and I don`t know that for certain," one senior
Western envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency said
on condition of anonymity.
"I do not get the sense that there is anything to indicate
that that is definitely happening," another diplomat said.
A senior official familiar with the investigation said
last week meanwhile that the Vienna-based IAEA had "no
information on any clean-up. We have been watching the site
with satellite images and we couldn`t spot any cleaning up".
The head of Iran`s Nuclear Energy Organisation, Fereydoon
Abbasi Davani, was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as
saying on Wednesday that "no nuclear activity whatsoever" had
taken place at Parchin.
An IAEA report published in November said there was "a
large explosives containment vessel" there for large-scale
conventional explosives tests consistent with designing a
nuclear warhead for Shahab-3 ballistic missiles.
As a signatory to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) supervised by the IAEA, Iran has to submit to UN
inspections at its declared nuclear sites.
But military sites that do not have confirmed nuclear
activities are off-limits unless provided for by agreement or
under the terms of an Additional Protocol to the NPT that Iran
briefly adhered to but dropped in 2006.
PTI
