IAEA aware of Tehran’s nuclear activities: Eslami
Iranian protestors have burned down the old home of the regime’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini as demonstrations continued despite fierce crackdown, social media footage showed.
Online videos captured protestors attacking the leader’s old home, which had been turned into a museum in a tribute to the architect of the Iranian Revolution that created the Islamic Republic in 1979.
Protesters took to the streets in at least 23 cities across Iran on Thursday. In the city of Khomein, birthplace of Khomeini, protesters set fire to the home-turned-museum of the Islamic Republic’s founder, footage circulating on social media showed. Other videos from Khomein showed protesters shouting slogans against Iran’s clerical leaders.
“This year is the year of blood, [Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei] will be toppled,” chanted protesters in the capital Tehran, a video posted by 1500tasvir showed.
Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency said five members of the security forces were killed during Thursday’s protests.
Meanwhile, Mohammad Eslami, chief of Iran’s atomic energy organization, said Iran has not done and will not do anything that the IAEA is not aware of.
The UN nuclear watchdog is aware of all of Iran’s activities, the head of country’s atomic energy organization said on Friday, a day after the atomic agency’s Board of Governors demanded explanation for traces of uranium at three undeclared sites.
The resolution, which was drafted on Thursday by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, said it was “essential and urgent” that Iran explain the origin of the uranium particles and more generally give the International Atomic Energy Agency all the answers it requires.
“Iran has not done and will not do anything that the agency is not aware of,” Mohammad Eslami, chief of Iran’s atomic energy organization was quoted as saying by the semi-official ILNA news agency.
“Our activities are all within the framework of regulations,” adding: “There is no problem about safeguards, which are the criterion of our cooperation.”
Resolution of the so-called “safeguards” investigations is critical to the UN agency, which seeks to ensure parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are not secretly diverting nuclear material which they could use to make a weapon.
“They have been pressuring Iran for 20 years, but negotiations have continued,” said Eslami.
“The political goals of the founders of this anti-Iranian resolution will not be realized but it could impact the constructive relations between Tehran and the Agency,” Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, Mohsen Naziri, said on Thursday, according to Iran’s state media.—Agencies
