Inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog agency have stripped most surveillance cameras and agency seals from Iranian nuclear sites and equipment as demanded by Tehran in response to its referral to the UN Security Council, diplomats said.
The diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity said on Saturday that the move was part of retaliatory measures announced by Iran that have left the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with only the most basic means to monitor Iran's nuclear activities.
It came as Iran's president suggested his country might pull out of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. (NPT).
With most surveillance equipment and seals from Iran's nascent uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz now removed -- and Iran recently ending the agency's rights to in-depth nuclear probes at short notice -- the IAEA has few means to monitor the progress of Tehran's enrichment efforts, which can create either nuclear fuel or the fissile core of warheads.
It also is crippled its efforts to look for secret sites and experiments that could be linked to nuclear arms.
A diplomat familiar with IAEA efforts in Iran said the cameras and seals were removed within "the last day or so" by a team of inspectors now in Iran in compliance with a written Iranian demand presented to the agency less than a week ago.
That request to IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei came two days after the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors reported Tehran to the Security Council on Feb. 4 over its decision to resume enrichment activity and suspicions that its atomic program represented a threat to world peace. Iran also announced a sharp reduction in the number and kind of IAEA inspections.
Iranian officials had repeatedly warned they would stop honoring the so-called "Additional Protocol" to the NPT if the IAEA board referred their country to the council.
The Additional Protocol had given the agency extra inspecting powers that allowed for inspections on short notice of areas and programs suspected of being misused for weapons activity.
Iranian officials have previously said they will continue honoring the NPT. Still, the agreements linked to that treaty are insufficient for agency inspectors trying to establish whether Iran has had a secret nuclear arms program.
And even the commitment to the NPT was in doubt on Saturday, after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suggested his country might walk away from it.
"Until now, we have worked inside the agency [IAEA] and the NPT [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] regulations," he told tens of thousands of Iranians massed in the Iranian capital to mark the 27th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.
"If we see you want to violate the right of the Iranian people by using those regulations [against us], you should know that the Iranian people will revise it's policies. You should do nothing that will lead to such a revision in our policy," Ahmadinejad said.
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