[Dr. Aaron Lerner - IMRA:

Instead of claiming that the photos were faked or explaining what the
demolished buildings were, the only thing Iran can offer in response is that
the charges are "irrelevant and unwise". ]

Iran Strongly Rejects Allegations about Demolishing Parchin Military Base
News number: 9103081818 11:24 | 2012-06-12
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9103081818

TEHRAN (FNA)- Senior Iranian officials denied western claims that it
demolished buildings at a military base that the western states allege was
involved in nuclear testing.

Iran's Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi said allegations that
Iran was trying to erase evidence at the Parchin military base are
"irrelevant and unwise".

"The allegations are aimed at affecting nuclear talks in Moscow," Vahidi
said, referring to an upcoming round of negotiations between Iran and six
world powers in the Russian capital later this month.

Meantime, Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency Ali Asqar
Soltaniyeh also dismissed the western claims that Iran has run suspicious
military activities at a military site near Tehran in the past and later
demolished the site to cleans its trace.

Reports that Iran has cleansed its Parchin military complex to destroy
evidence of nuclear weaponization, are "baseless noise based on lousy
intelligence," Soltaniyeh said according to the report dated yesterday.

During the last two years, Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog have been in
dispute over a number of issues which had been resolved between the two
sides before the new head of the IAEA, Yukiya Amano, ascended to power.

The main bone of contention in the talks between Iran and the IAEA is a
non-nuclear military site near Tehran that the UN agency wants to visit for
a third time.

After western intelligence agencies alleged that they had stolen a laptop
computer from Iran which contains studies about military nuclear activities
in Parchin military site - and although they refrained from presenting the
original documents to Iran - Tehran allowed IAEA inspectors to visit the
site twice and the IAEA team, led by the then deputy Director General Ollie
Heinonen, eventually declared that the alleged studies in Parchin had been
all baseless and unfounded.

Parchin was only one of the several problems in the relations between Iran
and the IAEA which were all resolved even before Amano took the lead in the
UN nuclear watchdog agency.

Before Amano came to power, his predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that
all misunderstandings and ambiguities about Iran's nuclear activities had
been removed.

A 2008 report of the IAEA by the then Director-General, Mohamed ElBaradei,
thanked Iran's honest cooperation in removing ambiguities about its past
activities and confirmed that Iran has answered all the six outstanding
questions of the world body about the nuclear material and activities that
it had had in the past.

Iran came clean of IAEA's questions and suspicions about its past nuclear
activities at the end of an action plan which was endorsed by the IAEA and
Iran in 2008, and Tehran said it considers its nuclear case closed after the
then IAEA chief endorsed that all misunderstandings had been resolved.

But the new director general, Yukiya Amano, in his first report after
ascending to power challenged Iran's nuclear activities, while many even in
the West believed that the report carried a US tone and wording on an IAEA
paper.

Tehran is now asking why it should allow the UN inspectors to visit this
non-nuclear military site a third time on the basis of the same allegations
which were announced baseless by the former IAEA chief.