TEHRAN: Iran condemned as “not fair” Tuesday a report by the UN nuclear watchdog on traces of nuclear material found at three undeclared sites, as talks on reviving a 2015 deal remain deadlocked.
“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.”
The IAEA’s report came as talks to restore the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and major powers have seen no major developments since March.
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.
Under the agreement, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi is due to “report his conclusions” to the watchdog’s board of governors at a meeting scheduled for next week.
While most of the activities concerned 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.
Earlier, Iran’s representative to the IAEA, Mohammad Reza Ghaebi, said the report “does not reflect Iran’s extensive cooperation with the agency”.
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