Iran's secret nuke labs
Iranian scientists are secretly conducting crucial nuclear research and development, using university laboratories as cover to avoid international scrutiny, according to highly placed opposition supporters within the Islamic regime.There is more. It would appear that some sites need to be added to our target list.
Teheran's Imam Hossein University, which is run on military brigade lines by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, is the main centre for experiments on nuclear weapon technology, the exiled National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) reported.
...Teheran is publicly flagging up its "peaceful" nuclear know-how in its showdown with the international community. But, at the same time, scientists with close ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) were conducting secret trials on military aspects of the programme, opposition figures said.
Alireza Jafarzadeh, the NCRI official who revealed the existence of the clerics' clandestine nuclear programme to the world in 2002, told the Sunday Telegraph that the latest information came from the same sources within the regime's national security structure.
He named 21 professors and researchers involved in nuclear work at the Imam Hossein University, many of whom also hold senior IRGC posts, as proof that the Revolutionary Guards were running Iran's supposedly "civilian" nuclear programme.
The IRGC's influence in the regime has strengthened since the election last year of Mr Ahmadinejad, who was a brigadier general in its Quds (Jerusalem) Force, the wing linked to a series of international terror attacks.
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In a photograph not previously published in Britain, the president is shown inspecting students in military cadet uniforms. He was told of "research achievements in the domains of defence and national security, basic sciences as well as technical and engineering fields", the Teheran-based Fars news agency reported.
Clandestine nuclear research is being led by scientists who were student radicals in the Islamic revolution that overthrew the last Shah in 1979, and share the activist background of Mr Ahmadinejad, 49.
Fereydoon Abbasi, 48, head of physics, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, has overseen the transfer of several nuclear experts to the university from other institutions.
Other key figures include Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, 45, a nuclear engineer whom the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has unsuccessfully sought to question, and Mansour Asgari, 48, a laser expert. They both lecture at Imam Hossein, but are based at the Centre for Readiness and New Defence Technology, to which the IAEA has been refused access by the regime.
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