UN nuclear inspectors headed on Monday for an alleged nuclear site in Syria that the United States says housed a secretly built reactor nearing completion when it was bombed by Israel nine months ago, a diplomat said. Syria denies it has any covert nuclear weapons programme and says the Israelis hit an ordinary military structure being built at al-Kibar, in the north-eastern desert.
Neither Syria nor the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has issued any information about the visit of the inspectors since they arrived in Damascus on Sunday.
"The visit (to the alleged nuclear site) is today," said a senior diplomat in Europe familiar with the IAEA. The team led by Olli Heinonen, head of the UN nuclear watchdog's global inspectorate, was also due to hold talks with Syrian officials before returning to Vienna on Wednesday.
Syria's silence on the visit, which it agreed with the IAEA on June 5, indicates how sensitive the issue is for President Bashar al-Assad, who has yet to retaliate for the Israeli raid.
The IAEA put Syria on its proliferation watch list in April after receiving intelligence photographs from the United States said to show a reactor that could have yielded plutonium, a nuclear bomb fuel. Washington said Syria, an ally of Iran whose own nuclear programme has been under IAEA investigation since 2003, had almost completed the plant with North Korean help. Pyongyang evaded IAEA checks and test-exploded a nuclear device in 2006. Syrian officials have accused the United States of fabricating evidence in collusion with Israel, believed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power.