VIENNA (Reuters) – UN chief of nuclear surveillance Rafael Grossi will travel to Tehran for the first time on Monday to pressure Iran to grant inspectors access to two suspected former atomic sites after a months-to-month standoff, he said Saturday.
The Board of Governors of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency approved a solution in June, pressuring Iran to allow inspectors to enter the sites discussed in two IAEA quarterly reports, as they can still space out undeclared nuclear tissues or lines of them.
“My purpose is for my meetings in Tehran to lead to concrete progress in addressing the notable problems that the Agency has related to the promises in Iran and, in particular, to the access factor,” said Grossi, who succeeded the IAEA director general in December. He said in a statement.
He said Grossi would meet with “high-level Iranian authorities,” without specifying who. Diplomats in Vienna said they expect the access blockade to be resolved before the next Governing Council assembly in September.
“We hope this scale will lead to greater mutual cooperation,” Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Kazem Gharibabadi, said in a statement through his project on Twitter.
(Reporting through Francois Murphy; Edited through Frances Kerry)
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