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Published 16 Jan, 2006 12:00am

IAEA urges Iran to allow inspection

NEW YORK, Jan 15: Warning Iran over the confrontation with the international community on its nuclear programme , Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Sunday that despite intensive three years of verification of Iranian nuclear programme, he was unable to make a judgment on its peaceful nature.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine released on Sunday, Mr ElBaradei said that he was prepared to “issue a report that will have major implications around the world’.

Mr ElBaradei asserted Iranian government has to allow access to the inspectors to avoid further escalation and ascertain “if they have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization programme along the way, they are really not very far — a few months — from a weapon. We need to revisit the treaty, because that margin of security is unacceptable.”

The IAEA chief, who is in the middle of the escalating tensions between Iran, Europe and the United States, told the magazine “for the last three years, we have been doing intensive verification in Iran, and even after three years I am not yet in a position to make a judgment on the peaceful nature of the [nuclear] programme”.

“We still need to assure ourselves through access to documents, individuals, [and] locations that we have seen all that we ought to see and that there is nothing fishy, if you like, about the programme,” he stressed.

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