TEHRAN —
Iran said Sunday
the technical inspection of new surveillance cameras for the Karaj nuclear
facility had begun after Tehran said previous cameras were damaged in an attack
it blamed on Israel.
اضافة اعلان
The new cameras, provided by the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are to replace those Iran says were
damaged on June 23 during an Israeli "sabotage" operation.
Tehran and the Vienna-based IAEA announced
Wednesday that they had reached agreement on replacing the cameras at the TESA
nuclear complex in
Karaj, west of Tehran, a facility which makes
centrifuges.
Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the
Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, listed the three conditions set by Tehran for the
reinstallation.
Iran demands "legal and security
investigations into the sabotage", the IAEA's condemnation of the matter,
and a "technical and security investigation of the cameras" before
their installation, he said, speaking on state television.
"The authorization given by Iran did
not come in the form of a new agreement, but after the three prerequisites were
met," Kamalvandi added.
The IAEA was not able to recover the camera
memory cards destroyed in June, and on Friday the agency's director general
Rafael Grossi said he had "doubts" over a missing camera memory unit.
Suspicions have been raised in Iran that
June's attack could have been enabled by the hacking of the cameras.
But Grossi dismissed that suggestion as
"absurd", insisting the monitors were tamper-proof and that, once
installed, they had no means of remote data transmission.
For the rest of the cameras at Karaj, as
well as at other sites where the IAEA's activity has been restricted since
February, Iran has said the footage will only be available to the IAEA once
US sanctions are lifted.
How and when Iran could get sanctions relief
is one of the topics being discussed at the Vienna talks.
Former US president
Donald Trump pulled out
of the nuclear deal in 2018 and imposed sweeping sanctions including a
unilateral US ban on Iran's oil sales, vowing to bring the US adversary to its
knees.
The talks — aimed at bringing the US back
into the agreement and Iran to roll back its nuclear activities — started in
April this year, but then stopped for several months as the Islamic republic
elected a new ultraconservative government.
The talks finally resumed in late November
and on Friday European diplomats warned that they were "rapidly reaching
the end of the road".
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