Suspect site razed by Syria: nuclear study group

By Mark Heinrich

VIENNA (Reuters) - New satellite pictures show Syria has razed the site of what might have been a secret nuclear reactor under construction apparently bombed by Israel last month, an atomic research institute says.

Syria has denied illicitly hiding a nuclear site from the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and said the only facility in the area in question was a desertification research centre.

In commercial satellite images taken on Wednesday and issued by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a suspected reactor building visible in aerial photos before the September 6 air raid had vanished and the ground underneath scraped clean, the institute said.

"Dismantling and removing the building at such a rapid pace dramatically complicates any (IAEA) inspection of the facilities and suggests Syria may be trying to hide what was there," the report by the Washington-based group said.

Tractors or bulldozers could be seen in the pictures where the building once stood, said ISIS, which is headed by former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright and tracks nuclear activity that could pose bomb-proliferation threats.

What appeared to be a trench might point to the Syrians excavating buried pipelines running between the demolished building and a nearby structure still standing, which could have been a pumping station to supply water to the reactor, it said.

The Vienna-based IAEA had no immediate comment.

NO CONCLUSIONS YET

The IAEA is examining commercial satellite imagery of the site, in remote northeast Syria near the Euphrates River 140 km (90 miles) from the Iraqi border, but reached no conclusions yet, Vienna diplomats say.

The U.N. watchdog has been seeking explanations from Damascus since shortly after the September 6 air strike.

"Albright's (findings) do not necessarily make this site a nuclear one. But the IAEA has not been sleeping; it is doing a detailed analysis," said a senior diplomat close to the agency.

Israel, the closest U.S. ally in the Middle East, has confirmed it carried out an air strike on Syria on September 6 but has not described the target. Syria said only that the target was a building under construction.

If Syria was indeed building a new atomic reactor, it would have been obliged to inform the IAEA and provide design data as soon as it decided to construct one. Syria is an IAEA member state and signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Syria has one declared, small research reactor subject to IAEA safeguards and inspections.

ISIS, the first to publicly pinpoint what Israeli warplanes had targeted, said in an earlier report that the site resembled a North Korean gas graphite nuclear reactor in design.