TEHRAN, 17 July 2005 — Iran’s spy chief yesterday warned the country’s nuclear scientists against “traps” laid by Israeli and American intelligence agencies. “Iranian scientists must beware of enemy plots,” Intelligence Minister Ali Yunessi was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency. “Americans and Israelis are trying to approach (them) through different means.”

“We call on scientists and specialists to be vigilant when they travel abroad so they don’t fall into enemy intelligence services’ traps,” he said. “We have identified a number of scientists who involuntarily fell into the traps of enemy intelligence services and we are saving them.”

Yunessi announced in December that around 10 people had been arrested on charges of spying for American and Israeli intelligence, including a number of workers at the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization.

Some of them were allegedly sent by the United States and Israel to try and sell nuclear material in a sting operation aimed at showing Tehran was seeking the bomb even as it insists its nuclear program is entirely peaceful. Washington and Israel have repeatedly accused the Islamic Republic of diverting its civilian nuclear energy program into manufacturing atomic weapons, charges Tehran strenuously denies.

Yunessi also said that Iran dismantled an Al-Qaeda cell in the east of the country in recent days that was preparing to launch attacks. Al-Qaeda had “organized and formed different groups to carry out terrorist acts primarily in the east of the country,” the minister said.

The cell was discovered last week, the minister said, but he did not specify whether the group planned to attack Iran or another country. The militant network had sought out “theology students and religious Sunnis,” he added. Younessi said the formation of this network constituted the “fifth wave” of Al-Qaeda actions in the Islamic republic since the 2001 demise of the Taleban regime in neighboring Afghanistan. Since then, the minister said about a thousand Al-Qaeda operatives have been “identified, arrested, extradited or judged, and at the present time 200 of them are still in prison.”