Iran ‘has bomb plans and uranium’

IRAN obtained weapons-grade uranium and a design for a nuclear bomb from a Pakistani scientist who has admitted to selling nuclear secrets abroad, an exiled Iranian opposition group said yesterday.

The group, which has given accurate information before, also said Iran is secretly enriching uranium at a military site previously unknown to the United Nations, despite promising France, Britain and Germany that it would halt all such work.

“(Abdul Qadeer) Khan gave Iran a quantity of HEU (highly enriched uranium) in 2001, so they already have some,” Farid Soleimani, a senior spokes-man for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), told reporters.

Mr Soleimani said Khan, who ran a global nuclear black market that supplied Libya and Iran with uranium-enrichment technology until it was shut down earlier this year, also gave Iran a Chinese-developed warhead design sometime between 1994 and 1996.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said Khan’s network gave Libya the bomb design and is trying to find out whether Iran got it too.

Pakistan’s mission to the UN in Vienna said it had no knowledge of this allegation.

IAEA officials, as well as Iran’s UN ambassador, were not immediately available for comment.

Diplomats in Vienna who follow the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, say the NCRI has been the best source of information on Tehran’s undeclared nuclear programme.