By KUNA,
Vienna : The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has not taken a decision on sending international inspectors to Syria once again after Wednesday’s visit, an IAEA official said on Thursday.
The official, who requested anonymity, told KUNA the inspectors visited a suspectd site in the eastern Syrian area of Deir Al-Zour, which was destroyed by Israeli air forces last September, and took samples of materials that will undergo tests that will take at least two months.
IAEA Director General Mohammad Al-Baradei might only issue a release on the inspection visit and distribute it to the members of the agency’s board of governors, that will meet in Vienna early September, if the tests showed that the destroyed site was not a nuclear facility as the United States and Israel claim.
However, diplomats in Vienna say western countries, headed by the US, plan to make the inspection visit a beginning to thorough investigations similar to those conducted by IAEA in Iran since more than five years ago to increase political pressure on Damascus.
Defending the Israeli raid on the Syrian site in 2007, the US claimed that the site hid a nuclear reactor that was built in cooperation with North Korea.
Damascus denied the US claims and stressed that the site was an unused conventional military building.