Alleged Syrian nuclear site
Photo: AFP
IAEA drafts report on Syria atom probe
UN nuclear watchdog publishes written report on alleged Syrian nuclear site bombed by Israel last year for first time since probe began, suggesting evidence of nuclear activity may have been found
The UN nuclear watchdog is drafting an investigative report on Syria for the first time, suggesting to Western diplomats the agency has found some sign of undeclared activity at a site bombed by Israel last year.
Moreover, Syria has been made an official agenda item at the year-end November 27-28 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors, unlike previously when IAEA officials said initial inquiries were inconclusive.
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The IAEA has been probing Syria since May over US intelligence allegations that it was close to completing a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor with North Korean help before Israel flattened the site in an air strike.
Syria denies pursuing nuclear energy for atomic bomb purposes in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It says the unverified US intelligence was fabricated.
A restricted copy of the 35-nation meeting's agenda said Syria was added to address a pending report by IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei, similar in format to those issued quarterly on an agency probe into Iran's secretive nuclear program.
"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.
"We do not have firm word on what the inspectors found (at the site), only that the findings suggest there are more questions to pursue," said another senior diplomat accredited to the agency.
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.
Diplomats said the IAEA apparently had now evaluated all the environmental swipe samples but exactly what the sleuths found remained unclear and would be laid out in the report.
Syria says all that was there was a disused military building, not a clandestine nuclear complex of North Korean design that could have yielded plutonium for atomic bomb fuel as Washington has maintained.
It told the IAEA in September it was cooperating fully with the IAEA inquiry but would not go as far as opening up military sites because this would undermine its security.
ElBaradei said then that Syrian cooperation had been "good" but Damascus needed to show "maximum cooperation" for the agency to draw conclusions.
Diplomats close to the IAEA say Syria has ignored agency requests to check three military installations that may have harbored materials connected to the alleged reactor site.
