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The UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, will report at a key meeting later this month that Iran has failed to honor some international nuclear safeguards, the director was quoted as saying on Tuesday. International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei told the Spanish newspaper El Pais that new breaches will be detailed in a report the IAEA is to present to its board of governors on November 20. "We reported breaches in the past and there will be new ones in this upcoming report," ElBaradei was quoted as saying by his spokesman Mark Gwozdecky. It was the first confirmation by the IAEA that new Iranian information, filed ahead of an October 31 deadline for Iran to prove it is not developing nuclear weapons, showed Iranian failures in honoring nuclear safeguards agreements. Tehran faces the possibility the IAEA will judge it to be in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and send the issue to the UN Security Council, which could then impose sanctions. The United States accuses Iran of secretly working to manufacture highly enriched uranium, which can be used to make atomic bombs, and says Tehran should be judged in non-compliance. But the IAEA board has so far avoided this step, giving Iran the last-chance deadline to provide full disclosure on its nuclear program. Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, said October 24 that there were disclosures in the report of "what could be considered failures" to adhere to the safeguards regime of the NPT, of which Iran is a signatory. He said these were "in the same line" as failures by Iran the IAEA had listed in a report in June. Salehi said the new failures involved "some lab tests". He did not provide details. But he said: "It is 100-percent clear that Iran has never been involved in anything that would indicate it was involved in a nuclear weapons program." ElBaradei said verifying the Iranian information would take time. "November 20 is an important milestone but we won't be able to finish our work by then. We will need a few more months, particularly with regard to very complex investigations such as the source" of traces of highly enriched uranium found by IAEA inspectors in Iran, ElBaradei said. Iran claims the uranium came from contamination of equipment it had bought abroad and not from producing the material, as the United States charges. ElBaradei said a problem in verifying the Iranian claims is that "there is more than one country which has supplied Iran with centrifuges" used in enriching uranium. Salehi has said Iran does not know where the equipment came from since it was bought on the black market when Tehran had to be "discreet" as it was developing its nuclear program in the face of international sanctions. All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse. Quick Links
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