Iran bans senior UN inspector
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-07-10 07:16
Iran has banned a senior UN nuclear inspector who has criticised the Tehran
government from visiting the country, a Western diplomat said on Sunday.
The diplomat, who spoke on condition on anonymity, was confirming a report in
the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, in which International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) Iran section head, Chris Charlier of Belgium, was reported as
saying that he had not been allowed into Iran for several months.
"I haven't been allowed to travel to Iran since April," he was quoted as
saying. "Since April, I have had no more contact with the Iranian nuclear file."
But a senior diplomat at the Vienna-based IAEA said Charlier was still the
chief of the agency's Iran section.
The IAEA has been inspecting Iran's nuclear programme since 2003. Although it
has found no hard evidence that Iran is working on atomic weapons, it has
uncovered many previously concealed activities linked to uranium enrichment, a
process of purifying fuel for nuclear power plants or weapons.
Tehran denies pursuing atomic weapons but refuses to temporarily halt its
enrichment programme as demanded by Germany and the five permanent members of
the U.N. Security Council.
Charlier was also quoted as saying he believed Iran was probably still hiding
things from the IAEA.
"It is very probable that Tehran is doing things in the nuclear field that to
this day we have no clue about," he said.
It was not immediately clear why Charlier was banned from Iran. But last year
he was interviewed for a BBC documentary on Iran's nuclear programme and
complained about the lack of freedom U.N. inspectors face in the country.
"Whatever we say, whatever we do, they're always behind
us with a video camera, with a microphone trying to record all our movement and
all things that we're saying," Charlier said, according to a transcript of the programme published on the Internet.
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