“Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Wednesday that a final nuclear deal with Iran could be derailed if new allegations from an Iranian dissident group that Iran is running a secret uranium enrichment operation at a facility near Tehran prove true,” The Washington Times reported.
Mr. Kerry told lawmakers that U.S. officials knew of charges related the site prior to this week, but that “it has not been revealed yet as a nuclear facility.”
“It is a facility that we are well aware of, which is on a list of facilities we have,” the secretary of state said during a Capitol Hill budget hearing on Wednesday morning. “I’m not going to go into greater detail.”
“But these things are obviously going to have to be resolved as we go forward,” he said.
Mr. Kerry made the comments during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, in which lawmakers raised questions about the revelations Tuesday by the National Coalition of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), exposing a secret facility has never before been revealed to international officials.
On Wednesday, a State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said: “We have seen these claims and we take all such reports seriously”, according to The Washington Post.
The NCRI revealed on Tuesday the details of Lavizan-3 top-secret site currently used by Iranian regime for research & development on nuclear field using advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
The NCRI announced that the explosive revelation was result of several years of detailed work by the network of the Iranian opposition movement, the People’s Mojahedin Organization in Iran (PMOI/MEK).
Rep. Brad Sherman, California Democrat, said in the hearing: “They [PMOI (MEK)] are the ones that told the world about the Iranian nuclear program.” “They now say that there’s a secret facility at Lavizan-3.”
PMOI’s sources established that since 2008 the Iranian regime has secretly engaged in research and uranium enrichment at this site.
The NCRI provided Satellite imagery of the site, its entrance, and overview of the site in the press conference.
The NCRI representatives ripped the Iranian regime’s claim regarding transparency in the nuclear talks and went on to say the Iranian regime is deceiving international community.
They pointed out that research and development with advanced centrifuges in highly secret sites are only intended to advance the nuclear weapons project.
The NCRI stressed if US is serious about preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, it must make continuation of the talks predicated on the IAEA’s immediate inspection of the site before the regime gets a chance to destroy the evidence.