A senior Iranian envoy accused the International Atomic Energy Agency on Wednesday of false reporting in saying that agency inspectors probing a laboratory for suspected undeclared nuclear experiments found some equipment removed.
Ali Ashgar Soltanieh declined a direct answer when asked if he was blaming the agency for a mistake or if he was suggesting another reason for the alleged false finding. But Soltanieh, Iran’s chief IAEA delegate, said his country would be asking for a formal correction in a letter to agency chief Yukiya Amano within the next week.
Soltanieh was referring to a finding published in the IAEA’s quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear activities that touched on experiments in pyroprocessing, a procedure that can be used to purify uranium metal used in nuclear warheads.
In January, Iran told the agency that it had carried out pyroprocessing experiments, prompting a request from the nuclear agency for more information — but then backtracked in March and denied conducting such activities.
IAEA experts last month revisited the site — the Jabr Ibn Jayan Multipurpose Research Laboratory in Tehran — only to establish “that the electrochemical cell had been removed” from the unit used in the experiments, according to the report.
