A United Nations nuclear watchdog team will visit Syria on June 22 to 24 to pursue an investigation into United States intelligence alleging that Damascus secretly built an atomic reactor, the agency’s chief said on Monday.
The alleged reactor site was destroyed in an Israeli air raid last September and Washington handed over intelligence to the International Atomic Energy Agency in April for verification purposes. Syria has denied any covert nuclear arms project.
”It has now been agreed that an agency team will visit Syria during the period 22 to 24 of June. I look forward to Syria’s full cooperation in this matter,” IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei told a meeting of the agency’s 35-nation board of governors.
He did not say whether Syria, which had not responded for months to IAEA requests for access needed for the inquiry, would allow inspectors to examine the al-Kibar site bombed by Israel in the country’s remote north-east desert.
A Western diplomat said the Vienna-based UN watchdog, which also has a long-running investigation into Iran’s shadowy nuclear programme, wanted to inspect not just al-Kibar but two other sites with possible nuclear links.
ElBaradei had said on May 7 that he hoped to be able to shed light ”in the next few weeks” on whether the Syrian facility was a nuclear reactor that should have been declared to the IAEA under Damascus’s nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations.
Syria, an ally of Iran, has rejected as fabricated US intelligence pointing to an almost completed graphite reactor erected with the help of North Korea, which left the NPT in 2003 and test-detonated a nuclear device in 2006.
Damascus, whose only declared nuclear facility is an old research reactor under IAEA inspection, has said Israel’s target was only a disused military building that had no nuclear link.
Analysts, citing satellite photos, say Syria has razed the site in the meantime, possibly to erase evidence.
ElBaradei, in his speech, again chided the United States for waiting until last month to share its intelligence.
”It is deeply regrettable that information concerning this installation was not provided to the agency in a timely manner and that force was resorted to unilaterally before the agency was given an opportunity to establish the facts,” he said.
”Nonetheless, I should emphasise that Syria, like all states with comprehensive [nuclear] safeguards agreements, has an obligation to report the planning and construction of any nuclear facility to the agency,” he said.
”We are therefore treating this information with the seriousness it deserves and have been in discussions with the Syrian authorities … to verify, to the extent possible at this stage, the veracity of the information available.” – Reuters