A fire that damaged a building used for producing centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear site was sparked by Israel, a Middle Eastern intelligence official told the New York Times on Sunday.
The unidentified official said the blast Thursday at the Natanz nuclear complex was caused by a powerful bomb.
A member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps also told the newspaper that an explosive was used, but didn’t specify who was responsible.
The Middle Eastern intelligence official said Israel wasn’t linked to several other recent mysterious fires in Iran over the past week.
The report came as Iran admitted that Natanz incurred “considerable” damage from the fire last week, as satellite pictures appeared to show widespread devastation at the sensitive facility.
Iran had sought to downplay the damage from the blaze, though analysts said it had likely destroyed an above-ground lab being used to prepare advanced centrifuges before they were installed underground.
“We first learned that, fortunately, there were no casualties as a result of the incident, but financial damages incurred to the site due to incident were considerable,” said Iran’s atomic agency spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi.
He confirmed that the damaged building was a centrifuge assembly center and not an “industrial shed,” as earlier claimed.
“More advanced centrifuge machines were intended to be built there,” he said, adding that the damage would “possibly cause a delay in development and production of advanced centrifuge machines in the medium term.”
Authorities have pinpointed the source of the fire, but are withholding the information for national security reasons, he said.
Satellite images of the Natanz site published Sunday by the London-based Iranian news site Iran International appeared to show that the site had incurred more significant damage from a mysterious blast last week than what Tehran had initially disclosed.
The photos showed most of the building flattened with debris scattered around the perimeter, indicating that it had been targeted in an explosion.
Experts assess that the damage from the apparent explosion has set back Iran’s nuclear program by a year, according to Israel’s Channel 13 news. The network said Sunday that the lab in Natanz where advanced centrifuges are assembled had been destroyed.
No comments:
Post a Comment