Syria has revealed some details of past nuclear experiments to the U.N. atomic watchdog but is still blocking access to a desert site where secret atomic activity may have taken place, a confidential IAEA report revealed late Monday.
U.N. inspectors demanded to examine the "Dair Alzour" site after U.S. intelligence reports alleged that Syria was building a secret nuclear reactor there with North Korea’s help.
The International Atomic Energy Agency report said that Syria "provided the Agency with information concerning previously unreported uranium conversion and irradiation activities" at a small research reactor in Damascus; but that Syrian officials were not allowing follow-up access to the desert site which was bombed to rubble by Israel in September 2007.
Syria allowed the IAEA to inspect the site in June 2008 but has not allowed the agency to revisit it since then. It insists the scale of the experiment was small, "involving tens of grams of nuclear material" and took place in 2004.
But a senior official familiar with the IAEA probe said it was not clear if the past work was just experimental, as Syria claimed, or if it could have had other uses. The report said the IAEA was examining further samples.
"Such access is essential to enable the agency to establish the facts and make progress in its verification, while protecting military and other information which Syria considers to be sensitive," IAEA chief Yukiya Amano wrote.
Syria, an ally of Iran which is under IAEA investigation over nuclear proliferation suspicions, has denied ever having an atom bomb program and says the intelligence suggesting it had is fabricated.
The issue, along with the IAEA’s concern about Iran’s atomic program, will be on the agenda at a meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors next week.