The United States said on Friday the first independent monitoring report on an alleged Syrian nuclear site had hardened suspicions that Syria was building a covert reactor and would raise pressure on it to come clean. The International Atomic Energy Agency report said that a Syrian complex bombed by Israel in 2007 bore multiple features resembling those of a reactor and UN inspectors had found a significant number of uranium traces at the site.
The findings, based on analysis of satellite pictures and soil and water samples taken at the site last June, were not enough to conclude a reactor was there, the IAEA said. But it said Syria had not heeded requests for documentation to back up denials of secret nuclear activity or repeated IAEA requests for visits to three other sites seen as harbouring possible evidence linked to Israel's target.
All four sites were landscaped to change their appearance and equipment removed - as well as all rubble from the bombed site - after the IAEA asked Syria for access, the report said. "The report reinforces the assessment of my government that Syria was secretly building a nuclear reactor in its eastern desert and thereby violating its IAEA (non-proliferation) safeguards obligations," said Gregory Schulte, US ambassador to the UN nuclear monitor.
"The report sharply contradicts a number of Syria's claims and catalogues Syria's repeated refusal to answer IAEA questions," he said in a statement, the first official US response. Syria, an ally of Iran whose disputed uranium enrichment programme has been under IAEA investigation for years, says the site destroyed was a conventional military building and the uranium traces must have come from munitions used to bomb it.
Senior UN officials familiar with the report said the traces were not from depleted uranium, a hardening agent in some ordnance, putting the onus on Syria for an explanation. "The IAEA needs to understand what Syria was building in secret then buried under meters of earth and a new building," Schulte said. "Syria is not Iran and we do not seek to make Syria into Iran. But this requires Syria to cooperate with the IAEA.
"We hope that it will not adopt the tactics of hindrance and unhelpfulness that Tehran has so finely honed and that remain so evident in the (IAEA's) latest report," he said. A separate agency report on Wednesday said Iran was still stonewalling an IAEA probe into alleged atomic bomb research by Tehran. UN officials said a stand-off had reigned since September with no communication between the sides.