BRUSSELS: The UN nuclear watchdog has information indicating that Syria was covertly building a nuclear reactor when Israel bombed the site in 2007, but has yet to reach a definite verdict, its head said on Thursday.
If Yukiya Amano formalizes the conclusion in his quarterly report on Syria, due within weeks, diplomats say the United States and its allies will seize on the finding to try to have Syria’s case referred to the UN Security Council.
The West is increasingly frustrated at what it sees as Syria’s stonewalling of an international probe into the Dair Alzour site, which US intelligence reports say was a nascent North Korean-designed reactor intended to make bomb fuel.
"We have the allegation that this facility was a nuclear reactor under construction," Amano, director general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in an interview in Brussels.
"We do have information that indicates that it was the case. But for now, as of today, we haven’t yet come to any conclusion."
Syria, an ally of Iran, denies ever having a nuclear weapons program. It has suggested uranium traces uncovered at Dair Alzour after a one-off IAEA visit came from Israeli munitions used in the attack. The agency has dismissed this as unlikely.
Damascus has rejected repeated IAEA requests for follow-up visits to the desert site.
No access
Amano, who in earlier reports said there were indications that nuclear activity may have taken place at Dair Alzour, made clear his view that Syria was not cooperating.
"We kept on asking Syria to accept our inspectors and I wrote a letter in November, but I haven’t received a positive response regarding the visit of inspectors to Dair Alzour."
But he said Syria had become more cooperative on another facility, a research reactor near Damascus.
The 35-nation IAEA board has the power to report countries to the Security Council if they are judged to have violated IAEA rules designed to make sure that nuclear technology is not diverted for military aims.
It reported Iran to the Security Council in 2006 over its failure to dispel suspicions that it was trying to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran has since been hit with four rounds of UN sanctions over its refusal to curb sensitive nuclear work.
Preparations for a possible US-led move on Syria at the board’s meeting from June 6 to 10 coincide with a Syrian crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising.
Western diplomats said the IAEA was unlikely to make a final assessment on Dair Alzour due to a lack of further access.
They say Syria’s refusal to let UN inspectors return to Dair Alzour risks undermining the IAEA and the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, if no action is taken.
Amano said: "Lack of cooperation on their part — and if we cannot draw conclusions — is not good for the IAEA, for Syria (or) for anyone." –Additional reporting and writing by Fredrik Dahl in Vienna
