Traces of uranium at Syrian site
2008-11-11 09:24
Vienna - UN investigators have found
traces of uranium at a Syrian site Washington says was a secret
nuclear reactor almost built before Israel bombed the target
last year, diplomats said on Monday.
They said the uranium contamination turned up in some
environmental swipe samples UN inspectors took at the site in
a visit last June. They said the finding was not enough to draw
conclusions but raised concerns requiring further clarification.
The International Atomic Energy Agency had no immediate
comment. But word of the finding leaked hours after IAEA
officials confirmed Director Mohamed ElBaradei was preparing a
formal written report on Syria for the first time.
Moreover, Syria has been made an official agenda item at the
year-end November 27-28 meeting of the UN watchdog's 35-nation
board of governors, unlike previously when IAEA officials said
initial inquiries were inconclusive.
Syria denies US allegations that it was building a reactor
with North Korean expertise designed to produce plutonium, the
main atomic bomb ingredient reprocessed from spent uranium fuel,
in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It says the unverified US intelligence was fabricated.
ElBaradei told an IAEA board meeting in September that
preliminary findings from test samples taken by inspectors
granted a visit in June to the desert location hit by Israel
bore no traces of atomic activity.
'Man-made' traces
Diplomats accredited to the Vienna-based nuclear watchdog
said a wider range of samples had now been analysed by its
sleuths and some had traces of a certain uranium compound.
"It isn't enough to conclude or prove what the Syrians were
doing but the IAEA has concluded this requires further
investigation," said one diplomat accredited to the IAEA.
"It was a man-made component, not natural (ore). There is no
sign there was already nuclear fuel or (production) activity
there," another diplomat told Reuters.
This diplomat noted that such traces could have been carried
to the site inadvertently on the clothes of scientists or
workers or on equipment brought in from elsewhere.
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That could echo a key, past finding made in the IAEA's
longrunning investigation of Iran's secretive nuclear programme.
Diplomats close to the IAEA have said Syria has ignored
agency requests to check three military sites for equipment or
other evidence possibly linked to the alleged reactor site.
"The agency clearly thinks it has something significant
enough to report to put Syria on the (nuclear safeguards) agenda
right after North Korea and Iran," said a senior diplomat with
ties to the Vienna-based UN watchdog.
"It's been made clear to us that the samples raise further
questions," said a fourth diplomat who like others asked for
anonymity in exchange for discussing confidential information.
The IAEA has been probing Syria since May, shortly after
Washington turned over intelligence about the site - but only
months after Israel flattened it and Syria swept it clean.
ElBaradei deplored the delay in intelligence-sharing and a
US failure to alert the IAEA before the bombing, saying this
would make it very difficult for the world's NPT guardian agency
to establish the facts "because the corpse is gone".