UN turns up pressure on Iran’s nuclear activities

TEHRAN: Iran was under diplomatic pressure yesterday after a UN watchdog report said it had expanded its nuclear program and was hampering inspections, and the leaders of the UN and Egypt criticized its key ally Syria.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, in Tehran for a summit, also called on Iran to release “opposition leaders, human rights defenders, journalists and social activists.”
Iranian officials responded to the International Atomic Energy Agency report by denying allegations it was cleaning up a suspect military base and saying the document’s release was timed to steal the spotlight from the Non-Aligned Movement gathering.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei opened the two-day NAM summit with a speech on Thursday railing against the United States, Israel and the UN Security Council, which are at the forefront of the pressure directed at his country.
He said Iran would “never” cease its nuclear energy activities, regardless of UN and Western sanctions, and insisted that the program was not aimed at developing nuclear weapons, whose use he called an “unforgivable sin.”
The IAEA report was released late on Thursday — in the middle of the summit — and said Iran had doubled its capacity to enrich uranium at its underground Fordo nuclear facility by installing, but not yet switching on, more than 1,000 new centrifuges.
It also said that UN inspectors wanting to see part of a military base in Parchin, outside Tehran, which is suspected of hosting tests of explosives that could be used in a nuclear warhead, had been “significantly hampered” by months of scrubbing and refused access.
Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi rejected the Parchin allegations, telling the ISNA news agency they had “no technical basis” and that “one cannot clean a site” of nuclear work.