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UN urges Syrian cooperation with nuclear inspectors

The UN nuclear watchdog chief urged Syria on Friday to show “transparency” and cooperate with inspectors from the world agency due to visit the middle eastern country this weekend.

The visit will be the start of an international fact check of US and Israeli assertions that Damascus had tried to build a plutonium-producing facility under the radar of the international community.

Mohamed ElBaradei, who heads the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told the pan-Arab television station al-Arabiya that he hoped Syria will let IAEA inspectors visit “all locations” they are interested in.

Syria said earlier this month it wouldn’t allow the IAEA to probe beyond a site bombed by Israel last September, despite IAEA’s expressed eagerness to visit three other suspect locations.

“We will go to Syria with open eyes and we will observe the facts ... all I ask of Syria is to show absolute transparency and help” ElBaradei said in the interview, aired late on Friday.

“I hope that Syria will take us to all the locations,” where allegedly there could be other reactors, he said.

His remarks reflected IAEA hopes that Syria could still warm to giving IAEA access to the three other sites. The main focus on the agency’s visit between today and Tuesday is the facility at al Kibar — a building in the country’s remote eastern desert that was destroyed in September by Israeli jets.

Syria agreed early this month to an IAEA demand to check US assertions that the target was a plutonium-producing reactor, nearly complete and thus at the stage where it could generate the fissile material for nuclear arms.

Neither the US nor Israel told the IAEA about the bombing until late April, about a year after they obtained what they considered decisive intelligence: dozens of photographs from a handheld camera of the inside and outside of the compound.

The satellite photos appeared to show construction crews using the interval to erect another structure over the site — a move that heightened suspicions of a possible cover-up.

ElBaradei again rebuked Israel for the bombing, condemning its “use of solo military force” and for not sharing its information with the IAEA.

“Before Israel’s hitting Syria ... we could have had the time to go to Syria to investigate and learn of any covert Syrian reactor,” ElBaradei said.

ElBaradei said that he had told the Syrians that, “if they, as they claim, don’t have any covert nuclear program, they have to practice absolute transparency.”

But he also cautioned that the probe of the bombed site would be “very difficult because the body of evidence is gone, that reactor has been destroyed.”

In the interview, part of which was aired earlier this week, ElBaradei also said that his agency didn’t have evidence Syria possesses the fuel or technical know-how for a large-scale nuclear plant.

“We have no evidence that Syria has the human resources that enable it to initiate a large-scale nuclear program,” he said.
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