Head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali-Akbar Salehi, denied on Friday allegations of a clandestine underground atomic site near the country's capital of Tehran, the local satellite Press TV reported.
Iranian Paris-based dissident group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said Thursday in Washington that it had discovered a secret underground uranium enrichment site in Abyek, about 120 km (70 miles) northwest of Tehran which the country started building in 2005.
"We don't have such a facility, if they have any details they should inform us so that we can thank them," Salehi was quoted as saying.
The country has plenty of facilities that, for example, sterilize agricultural products using nuclear technology which do not fall into the nuclear plant category, he said.
Currently, Iran's Natanz enrichment facility is enriching uranium to a level of 20 percent and another facility around Qom, Fordo, is under construction.
>>>On Thursday the Mujahedin Khalq Organization, or MKO, an Iranian exile group with ties to neoconservative opponents of Iran’s nuclear program in Washington, presented satellite photos to reporters and referred to unspecified intelligence sources that it said showed Iran was creating a secret nuclear enrichment plant in the village of Bahjatabad, near the city of Abeyk in Qazvin province.
Salehi said that the satellite images could show the site of another type of high-tech facility.
“Inside Iran there are many varieties [of plants],” he said, “be they of the radio-medical variety or centers for sterilizing agricultural products through radiation, none of which fits the technical definition” of a nuclear plant.
Arms control experts and the Pentagon cast doubt on the accusation.
“I don't know if this site is one that they have discovered that our intelligence experts have not seen,” Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell told Agence France-Presse.
The MKO, listed as a terrorist organization by the United States, divulged accurate information about Iran’s undisclosed nuclear facilities in Natanz and Arak in 2002, but has also led international inspectors on wild goose chases.
It spoke Thursday under the auspices of the Iran Policy Committee, formed in 2005 as a lobbying organization that advocates the overthrow of the government.
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