VIENNA: Iran’s participation at a UN atomic agency forum next week on creating a Middle East free of nuclear weapons was unclear Friday after a damning report from the Vienna-based watchdog.
Tehran had not signaled its attendance at the forum at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday and Tuesday by the time registration closed late Thursday, an official familiar with the matter said.
Iranian officials were not immediately available for comment.
The IAEA’s board of governors was expected Friday to pass a resolution expressing "deep and increasing concern" about Iran’s nuclear program following a critical report from the watchdog last week.
Iran has angrily rejected the report as being based on fake intelligence and says its nuclear program is peaceful.
The forum is aimed at learning from the experiences of other regions in creating a nuclear-weapon-free-zone (NWFZ) such as Latin America and the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, Africa and Central Asia.
The Middle East is a considerably more volatile region, however, marked by animosity between states and rocked this year by "Arab Spring" popular uprisings toppling regimes in a string of countries.
Iran is suspected of seeking to develop the bomb, leading to four rounds of UN Security Council resolutions, while Syria was also reported to New York this year over a suspected covert nuclear reactor.
That site, Dair Alzour, was allegedly bombed by Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons but has never confirmed it, and which unlike Syria and Iran has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
The forum comes ahead of a conference in 2012 to be hosted by Finland on ridding the powder keg of a region of nuclear weapons.
"I am encouraged by what I have heard during the consultations and I think that there is a genuine will to make this a positive experience," said the chairman of the forum, Norwegian ambassador Jan Petersen.
"This is an independent IAEA activity not formally linked to the 2012 NPT conference, but if successful it may be a building block towards 2012."
