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HomeIran News NowIran Nuclear NewsIranian regime refuses IAEA access to Parchin nuclear facility

Iranian regime refuses IAEA access to Parchin nuclear facility

NCRI – The Iranian regime will not give UN nuclear watchdog inspectors access to a military base outside Tehran that they have been seeking to visit since 2005, Defense Minister Hossein Dehgan said Saturday.

Dehgan’s comments, reported by state-run ISNA news agency, came just two days before a deadline for the regime to answer historic questions about the military dimension to its nuclear activities.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director Yukiya Amano, who visited Tehran earlier this month, had said in June that access to the Parchin base was essential for the watchog to be able to certify Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful.

During the past three years, the IAEA inspectors have frequently requested to visit a certain section of Parchin to study the unknown aspects of the regime’s nuclear weapons program, but the clerical regime has prevented such a visit to Parchin. During this period, the Iranian regime has been busy carrying out major changes in sections of Parchin to erase any trace and evidence of nuclear tests.

In recent years, the clerical regime has hidden parts of its nuclear weapons project in conventional military sites and has prevented IAEA access to these sites on the pretext that inspection of military sites is not within the scope of IAEA mandate.

In September 2009, the Iranian Resistance disclosed that in a section of Parchin nuclear site, tests for high-intensity explosions related to nuclear weapons are being conducted.

United Nations nuclear watchdog officials have said in the past that it would be virtually impossible for any regime to completely hide traces of nuclear material – and experts could detect particles that were 10,000 times smaller than a grain of sand.

The IAEA has been demanding access to the Iranian regime’s sprawling Parchin military base to hunt for clues that it is being used to build an atomic bomb.

Former chief IAEA inspector Olli Heinonen has said any attempt by Iranian regime to purge Parchin, near the capital Tehran, of clues would make the agency’s task considerably harder, but he added: “Complete sanitization is very difficult to achieve if nuclear materials were actually used.”