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Iran Opposition Claims to Have Found Secret Nuclear Site
[Asharq al-Aswat] Leading Iranian opposition members claimed Thursday to have uncovered a secret nuclear enrichment site buried in the mountains northwest of Tehran and run by Iran's defense ministry.Information obtained by the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran (PMOI) has revealed Iran began building the site in Abyek, about 70 miles (120 kilometers) northwest of Tehran, in 2005, the opposition members said. "This is controlled, run and operated... by the ministry of defense," Alireza Jafarzadeh, former media spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told a press conference in Washington. The PMOI, the main group in the NCRI, is officially listed as a foreign terrorist organization in the United States, although a judge ruled in July that it should be removed from the blacklist. Jafarzadeh said the information about the Behjatabad-Abyek site was shared this week with the US government, Congress and the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. There was no immediate comment from these bodies. Soona Samsami, who was US representative for the NCRI, said the Iranian authorities have so far spent 100 million dollars on the project and completed about 85 percent of the construction. The pair presented satellite pictures of excavation work at the alleged nuclear site, which they said supports information gleaned from sources "inside the Iranian regime" and showed what they said were four entrances and a tunnel. The mountain peak sitting atop the tunnel stands at 100 meters (330 feet), higher than the 80 meters (260 feet) nuclear experts say is required to prevent detection via radioactive emissions, Jafarzadeh said.
Posted by: Fred 2010-09-10 |
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