U.N. arms chief's inspectors want to visit 'areas of interest' at facility
The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog urged Iran on Tuesday to allow a team of experts to return to a military site called Parchin, which they inspected once but have since been barred from visiting.
"I would ... ask Iran to support the agency's efforts to pursue further its investigation of the Lavizan-Shian and Parchin sites," Mohamed ElBaradei said, adding that his inspectors wanted to visit "areas of interest" at Parchin.
Parchin, the center of Iran's munitions industry, and Lavizan are among the sites where the United States suspects Iranian scientists have conducted research related to the development of nuclear weapons.
Iran says it has no interest in such arms, only in civilian nuclear technology to generate electricity.
Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) visited Parchin earlier this year but Iran turned down a request for a follow-up visit. The United States believes Iran may have experimented with high explosives appropriate for atomic weapons at Parchin, 30 km (19 miles) southeast of Tehran.
A senior Iranian official did not say Iran would reopen Parchin's doors to inspectors, but said it was willing to talk.
"We will discuss (Parchin) with them. The door is not closed," Sirus Naseri, the head of Iran's delegation at this week's meeting of the IAEA board of governors, told reporters.
ElBaradei said in a speech to the 35-nation IAEA board that he wanted "access to dual-use equipment and other information related to the Lavizan-Shian site." The agency began looking at Lavizan last year after the site was razed.
The Iranians have admitted that Lavizan was once a military research and development site but denied conducting any nuclear weapons research there or anywhere else in Iran.
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