WorthyNews: UN Nuclear Watchdog Seeks Urgent Talks With Iran Over Program

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By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News

JERUSALEM/TEHRAN (Worthy News) – The chief of the United Nations atomic watchdog said Monday he hopes to hold talks with new Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian by November amid mounting concerns about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

Rafael Grossi, who leads the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said it has been “more than three and a half years since Iran stopped implementing its nuclear-related commitments under the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as the 2015 Iran nuclear deal].”

The deal included “provisionally applying its Additional Protocol, and therefore, it is also over three and a half years since the Agency was able to conduct complementary access in Iran,” Grossi added a statement to a quarterly meeting of his agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors.

“Consequently, the agency has lost continuity of knowledge in relation to the production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water and uranium ore concentrate,” Grossi warned.

“Iran says it has declared all nuclear material, activities, and locations required under its NPT Safeguards Agreement. However, this statement is inconsistent with the agency’s findings of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at undeclared locations in Iran. The agency needs to know the current location(s) of the nuclear material and/or contaminated equipment involved,” he added.

Israel and other countries fear the Islamic-run country is near reaching the capabilities of developing nuclear weapons. Tehran says its program only serves “peaceful purposes.”

The U.N. announcement also came after late last month, it was revealed that an Iranian hacking group ran a fake professional recruiting business to lure national security officials across Iran, Syria, and Lebanon into a cyber espionage trap.

U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant, a division of tech giant Alphabet’s Google Cloud, said the hackers are loosely connected to a group known as APT42 or Charming Kitten, which was accused of hacking Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

APT42 is widely attributed to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard intelligence division, an expansive military organization based in Tehran. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has said it is investigating APT42’s ongoing efforts to interfere in the 2024 U.S. election.

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