By Francois Murphy
VIENNA, Sept 14 (Reuters) – The UN nuclear watchdog on Tuesday called incidents in Iran with its personnel “unacceptable” in which, according to diplomats, security personnel subjected female inspectors to inappropriate searches that The United States qualifies as harassment.
In a first case that occurred this year at the Natanz nuclear facilities, an inspector was subjected to an unnecessarily intrusive search by security personnel, diplomats with ties to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said.
Details of the June episode remain unclear, as do the incidents that have been repeated since then in Natanz, where an explosion and power outage that Iran has blamed on Israel damaged the machines at its main underground oil enrichment plant. uranium in April.
“In recent months, there have been some incidents related to security checks by Agency inspectors at an Iranian facility,” the IAEA said in a statement issued in response to a Wall Street Journal report on the episodes.
The IAEA, which treats the details of the inspections as confidential, did not specify the gender of the inspectors or say what happened.
“The Agency immediately and firmly raised this issue with Iran to explain in very clear and unequivocal terms that these types of security-related incidents involving Agency personnel are unacceptable and should not happen again,” he said. the IAEA.
“Iran has provided explanations related to the reinforcement of security procedures following the events that occurred at one of its facilities. As a result of this exchange between the Agency and Iran there have been no further incidents.”
Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA, Kazem Gharibabadi, said on Twitter: “Security measures at Iran’s nuclear facilities are reasonably stricter. IAEA inspectors have been developing the new rules and regulations.” (Report by Francois Murphy Edited in Spanish by Javier López de Lérida)