IAEA Chief Says 'Activities' Ongoing at Iran's Parchin Site

The U.N. atomic agency chief said Monday "activities" were ongoing at Iran's Parchin military complex, making a trip there by inspectors probing suspected weapons work soon all the more important.

"I cannot get into the details but I can tell you that we are aware that there are some activities at Parchin," Yukiya Amano told reporters at International Atomic Energy Agency headquarters in Vienna.

"This makes us believe that going there sooner is better than later."

The IAEA said in a major report in November that it believed Iran had carried out high-explosives tests in a bus-sized metal container at Parchin near Tehran that it suspected were aimed at developing nuclear weapons.

In two visits to Iran this year, a team led by chief inspector Herman Nackaerts was refused access to Parchin, according to the IAEA. Iran denies wanting nuclear weapons and has said the November report was based on fabricated intelligence.

Western diplomats to the IAEA have said that they suspect Iran is cleaning up the site in order to remove evidence.

Iran is highly sensitive about allowing access to military sites following a huge explosion at the Bid Ganeh base on November 12 that killed 36 Revolutionary Guards including a key figure in Iran's ballistic missile program.

A string of nuclear scientists have also been assassinated in attacks blamed by Tehran on the United States and Israel, the latest the 32-year-old deputy director of Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility in January.

Amano told a news conference on the sidelines of an IAEA board of governors meeting that Iran had made a last-minute offer to Nackaerts and his team to visit another site, in Marivan, that was mentioned in the November report.

"The alternative site was offered but until the last stage of our visit we didn't know the name, we didn't know which the alternative site was. It was only a few hours before departure that we learned" it was Marivan, Amano said.

"With that we had a serious problem. That is why we didn't go to Marivan."

The IAEA's November report said that information from an unnamed member state suggested that "large scale high explosive experiments" had been carried out in the Marivan region in northwest Iran, near the Iraqi border.

The IAEA said after the latest visit, branded a "failure" by Washington, that "major differences" existed between Tehran and the agency on the way forward.

A new report meanwhile said last month that Iran has substantially ramped up the enrichment of uranium, in defiance of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, to 20-percent purity.

Uranium enriched to 90 percent can be used in a nuclear bomb.