Iranian reporting contradictions not due to error – US

AFP: Contradictions in Iran’s reporting to the UN atomic agency on its nuclear program are too “pervasive” to be due to “inadvertent error,” US ambassador Jackie Sanders said Thursday. “These continuing contradictions between Iran’s declarations and the facts as they are uncovered cannot be explained by inadvertent error. They are simply too numerous and pervasive,” Sanders told a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency that had just heard on IAEA report on Iran. AFP

VIENNA – Contradictions in Iran’s reporting to the UN atomic agency on its nuclear program are too “pervasive” to be due to “inadvertent error,” US ambassador Jackie Sanders said Thursday.

“These continuing contradictions between Iran’s declarations and the facts as they are uncovered cannot be explained by inadvertent error. They are simply too numerous and pervasive,” Sanders told a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency that had just heard on IAEA report on Iran.

IAEA deputy director for safeguards Pierre Goldschmidt told the agency’s 35-nation board of governors that Iran had falsely reported the timing of plutonium experiments, according to a text of his speech obtained by AFP.

Iran has admitted, after an IAEA analysis of samples, to separating out small amounts of plutonium, a potential material for atomic bombs, more recently than it originally reported.

The IAEA “has been pursuing with Iran the dates of its plutonium separation experiments” and Iran has admitted to purifying one bottle of plutonium in 1995 and solution in a second bottle as late as 1998, Goldschmidt said.

This was a revision of Iran’s statements since 2003 “that the experiments were completed in 1993,” according to the text of his speech.

“Iran has also been caught, yet again, misleading the IAEA about its past plutonium separation experiments,” Sanders said.

She said the “five-year discrepancy” led to “no other conclusion but that this is yet another previously unreported activity, and another breach of Iran’s safeguards obligations” under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).