Iran changes story on plutonium experiments

VIENNA - Iran has admitted to experimenting with producing plutonium, which can be used to fuel atomic bombs, much more recently than it originally told the United Nations nuclear watchdog, according to a draft UN speech.

Originally Iran had told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that its last experiments with the reprocessing of plutonium took place in 1993 but revised that date to 1998, according to a draft speech deputy IAEA chief Pierre Goldschmidt is due to make to the agency's board of governors on Thursday.

The speech, obtained by Reuters, said the IAEA had asked Iran to confirm that one bottle of a solution containing plutonium "had been processed in 1995 while the solution in the second one had been purified in 1998". It added that Iran confirmed this in a letter dated May 26, 2005.

Diplomats said this was another breach of Iran's obligation to provide a full and accurate declaration of all sensitive nuclear materials in the country as required by the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

"This is nuclear material and, yet again, when Iran's backed into a corner the story changes," a Western diplomat on the IAEA board of governors said.

Goldschmidt's speech said Iran had not provided all documentation related to shipments of nuclear equipment sold to Iran by black marketeers. Also, some of the documents Tehran did provide contradicted previous information it had given the IAEA, the speech said.

Access to these documents "is essential for verifying the completeness of Iran's declarations concerning such (uranium enrichment) equipment", the speech said.

- REUTERS