Tehran: Iran's Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said on Saturday that the report of the IAEA on the country's Parchin military base lacks "technical significance".
"Such claims are void of any technical significance. Anybody, who is an expert in the field, knows that such claims are excuses and (the traces of) issues like that (explosive experiments) cannot be removed by cleanup," said Salehi on the sidelines of the ongoing Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit here, reported Xinhua, citing the semi-official ISNA news agency.
An IAEA report said Thursday that Iran has expanded its potential capacity to refine uranium in an underground site by doubling its centrifuges from 1,064 to 2,140 and it has cleansed another site where the agency suspected the country had conducted explosive experiments linked to production of nuclear weapons.
Referring to Parchin in suburban Tehran, the agency said the cleanup would "significantly hamper" the ability of its inspectors to understand what kind of work had taken place there.
The UN nuclear watchdog urged Iran to immediately open the base to UN inspectors to clarify its nuclear programme.
IANS
First Published: Saturday, September 01, 2012, 13:22