IAEA Team Planning Iran Visit on Monday to Discuss 2 Remaining Issues

(FNA)- Spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Behrouz Kamalvandi announced that a high-ranking team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is due to arrive in Tehran on Monday to discuss the two remaining issues in Iran's nuclear dossier.

"The IAEA team will have a two-day visit to Tehran on Monday and they plan to hold negotiations with the AEOI officials and experts," Kamalvandi told the state-run news agency on Saturday, adding that "the team will be headed by the IAEA Deputy Director General (and Head of the Department of Safeguards Tero Varjoranta)".

Noting that the IAEA has delayed declaring the results of its analysis of the information sent by Iran about the two recent issues that were mentioned in the third stage of their cooperation agreement, he said one of these cases is about the alleged initiation of explosives in Marivan, and the other one is related to papers published in Iran in relation to neutron transport and associated modeling and calculations and their alleged application to compressed materials.

"Iran has told them that if they think some explosions have taken place, they should specify its location so that we will give you (controlled) access (to such alleged sites)," Kamalvandi said.

He explained that Iran and the IAEA's step-by-step cooperation is based on this agreement that the two sides can deal with other steps only after finalizing different subjects mentioned in the previous step, and thus, Tehran and the UN nuclear watchdog will not deal with other issues before wrapping up the two aforementioned issues with regard to Marivan and neutron transport case.

The last technical meeting between the two sides was held in November last year.

Last Monday, the IAEA once again verified lack of any diversion towards non-peaceful purposes in Iran’s declared nuclear material.

“Concerning safeguards implementation in Iran, the agency continues to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement,” IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano  said in an address to the agency’s Board of Governors in the Austrian capital city of Vienna.

Late in February, Iran's Envoy to the IAEA Reza Najafi announced that the transparent nature of Tehran's nuclear program was confirmed in the IAEA's meeting.

Najafi described the IAEA's technical meeting as "useful", and said it focused solely on technical issues and dedicated its time to exploring the recent report of the UN nuclear watchdog's chief.

He stressed that the meeting acknowledged that the whole of Iran’s nuclear program including installations, equipment and material were totally monitored by the IAEA experts, adding that this proved Iran’s transparency in its nuclear activities.

The Iranian official further pointed out that the meeting also reviewed the recent meeting between Amano and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif which took place on the sideline of a security conference in Munich recently.

Najafi said the meeting stressed the need for continuation of nuclear talks between Iran and the world powers until the ultimate settlement of the issue.