'Radioactive attack possible,' says IAEA head

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said Monday that the chances of terror groups attempting to carry out an attack on a radioactive facility are increasing and in fact supersede their chances of obtaining nuclear weapons.

"Terror groups might try to attack a facility housing radioactive materials in a populated area or even in one (of the world's) capitals, which could lead to a wide area being infected with radiation and thousands of deaths," ElBaradei told the London based, Arab-language al-Hayat newspaper.

"We know the terror organizations would like to carry out such an attack and in fact they are more likely to succeed in that than they are in getting their hands of nuclear weapons,' he added.

As for the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, ElBaradei said that the IAEA was not very worried: "The IAEA didn't see any active plan to manufacture nuclear weapons in Iran… we saw no evidence of an underground uranium enrichment facility, nor do we have any intelligence suggesting such activity.

"Iran still has some questions to answer," said ElBaradei, "but I can't say it poses a clear and immediate danger… all this talk about world war III just aggravates me."

Al-Hayat quotes ElBaradei as saying the IAEA began probing the Iranian nuclear program back in 1985 and has been quite successful in doing so, "but we're still trying to get some answers and we expect Iran to be cooperative… the next month or so are crucial, since it has recently agreed to work with us an all those matters."

And what of Pakistan's Abd al-Khader Khan's nuclear network? "That was a network spanning over 30 countries, reaching Libya, Iran and maybe even North Korea," he said.

Syrian President Bashar Assad was recently quoted by the Austrian daily Die-Presse as saying that Khan's people approached him six years ago and offered him nuclear weapons, but he refused.