TEHRAN —
Iran condemned as “not fair” Tuesday a report by the UN nuclear watchdog on
traces of nuclear material found at three undeclared sites.
اضافة اعلان
The comments
came with talks deadlocked since March on reviving a 2015 nuclear agreement
between Tehran and world powers.
“Unfortunately,
this report does not reflect the reality of the negotiations between Iran and
the
IAEA,” foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told reporters,
referring to the Monday report by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
“It’s not a fair
and balanced report,” he said, adding: “We expect this path to be corrected.”
In the report,
the watchdog said it still had questions which were “not clarified” regarding
nuclear material previously found at three sites — Marivan, Varamin and
Turquzabad — which had not been declared by Iran as having hosted nuclear
activities.
It said its
long-running efforts to get Iranian officials to explain the presence of
nuclear material had failed to provide answers to its questions.
Iran and the
IAEA agreed in March on an approach for resolving the issue of the sites, one
of the remaining obstacles to reviving the 2015 deal. IAEA chief
Rafael Grossi is due to “report his conclusions” to the watchdog’s board of governors at a
meeting scheduled for next week.
Formally known
as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 deal gave Iran relief from
crippling economic sanctions in exchange for curbs on its nuclear activities.
The parties to
the pact with Iran saw it as the best way to stop it from building a nuclear
bomb — a goal Tehran has always denied.
Iran sees Israeli
hand
Then-
US president Donald Trump unilaterally pulled out of the pact in 2018
and reimposed biting sanctions, prompting Iran to begin rolling back on its own
commitments.
While most of
the activities discussed in the IAEA report are thought to date back to the
early 2000s, sources say that one of the sites, in the Turquzabad district of
Tehran, may have been used for storing uranium as recently as 2018.
Iran saw an
Israeli hand in the IAEA’s latest findings.
“It is feared
that the political pressure exerted by the
Zionist regime and some other actors
has caused the normal path of the agency’s reports to change from technical to
political,” Khatibzadeh said.
Israel on
Tuesday accused its arch-foe Iran of stealing classified documents from the
IAEA to help it hide evidence of its nuclear program.
Israel is
adamantly opposed to the 2015 nuclear deal and any effort to restore it.
“Iran stole
classified documents from the
UN’s Atomic Agency IAEA and used that information
to systematically evade nuclear probes,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett
claimed on Twitter.
“How do we know?
Because we got our hands on Iran’s deception plan,” Bennett wrote. His tweet
included a link to eight files of documents in English and Farsi, as well as
photographs.
The files were
part of a cache allegedly taken by Israeli agents from an Iranian warehouse in
2018.
Iran’s
representative to the IAEA, Mohammad Reza Ghaebi, said earlier that the IAEA’s
report “does not reflect Iran’s extensive cooperation with the agency”.
“Iran considers
this approach unconstructive to the current close relations and cooperation
between the country and the IAEA,” he said, adding: “The agency should be aware
of the destructive consequences of publishing such one-sided reports.”
In a separate
report published Monday, the IAEA estimated that Iran’s stockpile of enriched
uranium had grown to more than 18 times the limit agreed in the 2015 deal.
Iran seeks the
lifting of all sanctions that followed Trump’s 2018 pullout.
“The issues
being discussed between Iran and the US are related to the economic benefits to
Iran and removing all the elements of the maximum pressure by the US,”
Khatibzadeh said.
“The pause in
the negotiations is due to the US not giving an answer to the initiatives
proposed by Iran and Europe.”
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