Syria dismisses IAEA concern on uranium traces

VIENNA (Reuters) - Syria on Tuesday brushed off U.N. nuclear watchdog concerns over further traces of undeclared processed uranium found in the country, saying the agency was treating it unfairly.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has been examining U.S. intelligence reports that said Syria almost built a North Korean-designed, graphite reactor to yield plutonium for atom bomb fuel before Israel bombed it to pieces in 2007.

In a June 5 report, the Vienna-based IAEA said particles of processed uranium showed up in swipe samples taken by inspectors at a second spot in Syria and it was checking for a link to traces retrieved from the bombed Dair Alzour site.

Syria has said the Dair Alzour traces came with Israeli munitions used in the strike and denies hiding anything from the IAEA. But the agency says Damascus is withholding documentation and blocking access for inspectors needed to clarify the case.

"We have an inventory which we have declared," Syrian atomic energy agency director Ibrahim Othman told Reuters.

"Is it part of our obligation to declare contaminated areas which we don't know about?" he said on the sidelines of a weeklong meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors.

IAEA governors were to debate the issue, along with IAEA findings of major advances in Iran's secretive uranium enrichment program, in a closed-door session on Wednesday.

Othman said U.N. inspectors' second uranium discovery at the Miniature Neutron Source Reactor in the capital constituted only "one particle or two particles of natural uranium."

He said Syria would tell the board its case was being mishandled and he questioned the IAEA's grasp of physics, saying that the Damascus research reactor did not have the structure or components needed for uranium testing.

The IAEA said this year inspectors had found enough traces of uranium in soil samples collected a year ago at the bombed site to constitute a "significant" find.

They subsequently detected similar "manmade" uranium particles in test swipes at the Damascus research site which the IAEA knew about and checked routinely.

U.S. analysts said the findings raised the question of whether Syria used some natural uranium intended for the reactor at Dair Alzour for experiments applicable to learning how to separate out plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.

Syria's only declared nuclear site is the Damascus research reactor and it has no known nuclear energy-generating capacity.

It has said the U.S. intelligence, including satellite pictures, about a secret reactor is fabricated, and that Israel's target was only a conventional military building.

IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei has said the allegations are serious and must be clarified. But he has also chided the United States and Israel for failing to alert the U.N. watchdog about the site before it was bombed to rubble, saying this had made the search for truth extremely difficult.

(Editing by Alison Williams)