Iran doubles capacity to refine uranium: UN

Iran has more than doubled its capacity to refine uranium at an underground bunker, the United Nations said on Thursday as Tehran was accused of re-activating the shadowy scientist at the heart of its alleged nuclear weapons programme.

The International Atomic Energy Agency's latest quarterly report said that 1,000 new — though not yet operational — centrifuges had been installed at the fortified Fordow facility since May, in defiance of Western sanctions. The plant is used to enrich uranium at levels close to weapons grade, according to Western diplomats.

The UN's nuclear watchdog also said that Iran had increased its stockpiles of higher-grade enriched uranium from 145kg to 190kg in the past three months.

Those findings alone, while not unexpected, will provoke calls for tougher sanctions against Iran and raise speculation that Israel could launch unilateral military action within weeks.

It also emerged yesterday that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, often viewed as the mastermind of the Iranian regime's efforts to become a nuclear power, had been put back to work.

Israel said the claims of his return, taken together with the IAEA's latest assessment of Iran's enrichment activities, were evidence that Tehran was moving into place the final elements it needed to build a nuclear bomb.

"Iran continues to enrich uranium, which shows that sanctions are not having any effect," one diplomat said. "More importantly, we are seeing them put the final pieces of the jigsaw into place.

"In full contempt of international opinion, the Iranians are racing towards the finishing line and they are now just metres away from it."

After apparently being sidelined for several years, Fakhrizadeh was back at work having taken charge of a research facility in Tehran that studies how to build a nuclear weapon, UN, American and Israeli officials told the Wall Street Journal.

The allegations present the biggest challenge yet to an American intelligence assessment in 2007 which concluded that Iran had frozen the military element of its nuclear programme even as it pressed ahead with its efforts to enrich uranium.

Those findings were largely based on intercepted emails from Fakhrizadeh that state funding for his secret nuclear weapons research had been cut off.

In a confidential appendix of a report it released last year, the IAEA said it suspected that the scientist, who is ostensibly a physics lecturer at Tehran's Imam Hossein University, was again involved in the nuclear programme.

The latest findings place him in a senior role and suggest that the clandestine element of Iran's nuclear activities have been centralised in a way not seen since 2003. Iran has gone to great lengths to shield Fakhrizadeh from view. No known photographs of him exist in the public domain, and efforts by nuclear inspectors to interview him have always been rebuffed.

The IAEA has also persistently been denied access to the Parchin military base near Tehran, where Western officials believe tests on how to detonate a nuclear weapon have been carried out even before Fakhrizadeh's return.

Diplomats say the report, which is to be circulated confidentially, will accuse Iran of sanitising the base to such an extent that there would now be little point in inspecting it. The West has accused Iran of bulldozing parts of the base, and satellite imagery released this month showed a building suspected of housing explosives experiments covered in tarpaulin, perhaps to hide the removal of incriminating material.

Israeli government officials say that the IAEA's conclusions leave little doubt that Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power as soon as it chooses.

Despite Israel's increasingly overt agitation for military action, Western officials appear poised to make a fresh attempt to resolve the crisis through diplomacy. Baroness Ashton, the European Union high representative for foreign affairs, said yesterday that she would conduct talks with Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, "in the coming days".

The announcement came as Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that his country would never seek nuclear weapons. "Our motto is nuclear energy for all and nuclear weapons for none," he told heads of state in Tehran for the annual summit of the Non-aligned Movement.