DAMASCUS - Syria dismissed on Saturday an International Atomic Energy Agency recommendation to allow its inspectors unrestrained access, days after the agency said a bombed Syrian complex could have been a nuclear site.El-Baradei is no longer in charge at the IAEA, and suddenly the agency has grown a spine. Wotta coincidence ...
An IAEA report said on Thursday that Uranium particles found at a Syrian complex destroyed by an Israeli air raid in 2007 suggest the possibility of covert nuclear activity at the site. The report, by new IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano, prodded Syria to adopt the IAEA's Additional Protocol, which permits unfettered inspections beyond a declared nuclear site to check out any covert atomic activity.
“We are committed to the non-proliferation agreement between the agency and Syria and we (only) allow inspectors to come according to this agreement,' Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem said.
“We will not allow anything beyond the agreement because Syria does not have a military nuclear programme. Syria is not obliged to open its other sites to inspectors,' Moualem said after meeting his Austrian counterpart Michael Spindelegger.
Moualem did not address the findings of the latest IAEA report on Syria and repeated Syria's position that its nuclear activities are peaceful and related mostly to medicine.
The United States said the site bombed by Israeli warplanes three years ago at al Kubar, around 60 km (37 miles) west of the city of Deir al-Zor, was a North Korean designed nuclear reactor geared to making weapons-grade plutonium. The IAEA report lent public support for the first time to the U.S. assessment.
Previous IAEA reports on its investigation into Kubar said lack of Syrian cooperation impeded the investigation. U.N. inspectors examined the site in June 2008 but Syrian authorities has barred them access since and did not let them visit three military sites.
The IAEA has also been checking whether there could be a link between the particles uncovered at Kubar and similar traces detected in swipe samples taken at a Damascus nuclear research reactor later in 2008.
The report said Syria had refused a meeting in Damascus last month to address the issue. But inspectors now planned to visit the research reactor on Feb. 23.