By SPA,
Vienna : Iran on Thursday refuted all evidence of a possible military dimension of its nuclear programme as US fabrications, according to dpa.
Tehran’s representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said documents presented by the UN nuclear watchdog were fakes.
In a briefing for the IAEA’s 35 board member states, chief inspector Olli Heinonen laid out intelligence the IAEA received from about 10 member states, diplomats present at the meeting said.
The weaponization studies regarding uranium conversion, high explosives testing and design of a missile re-entry vehicle remained a “matter of serious concern,” IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said in a confidential report forwarded to the UN Security Council on Monday.
“Substantive” information was needed from Iran to verify its claims that there was no military dimension to its nuclear programme, ElBaradei said, while Iran claims it “left no question unanswered.”
Iran refuted the intelligence, pointing out discrepancies in details of names of involved officials, dates and procedural inconsistencies.
“Whatever is shown in the papers, films and drawings is fabrications … It has many inconsistencies. In fact, the CIA has done a lousy job. They could at least have prepared something that could fly,” Soltanieh told journalists.
IAEA inspectors were regarding the information as quite credible, giving the range of sources, content and timeframe of the documents, a senior UN official said.
“As today’s briefing showed us there is strong reason to suspect that Iran was working covertly and deceitfully at least until recently to build a bomb,” US Ambassador Gregory Schulte told journalists after the briefing.
The US National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, said the US had reason to believe Iran had been working on a covert weapons programme until mid-2003.
Soltanieh told reporters a laptop with information on the alleged weaponization studies contained false evidence planted by the United States.
Seals for classifying the allegedly top secret documents were missing on the intelligence shown by the IAEA, he added.
“How can you have some sort of a Manhattan project that has no seal of confidentiality?” he asked.