UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations dampened a flurry of excitement on Wednesday over an apparent statement by a Syrian diplomat that Israel had bombed “nuclear facilities” in Syria, saying there had been a mistranslation.
Israel has confirmed that 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.
A U.N. press release on a meeting of the General Assembly’s Disarmament Committee held on Tuesday quoted an unnamed Syrian diplomat as charging that Israel had “taken action against nuclear facilities, including the 6 July attack in Syria.” For good measure, the release got the month wrong.
When incredulous journalists asked whether Syria was confirming Western reports that Israel may have hit a partially built atomic reactor, U.N. officials retrieved a tape recording of the meeting and said the diplomat had said no such thing.
They issued a transcript of the comments according to which the diplomat said Israel “violates the airspace of sovereign states and carries out military aggression against them, like what happened on the 6th of September 2007 against my country.”
U.N. officials said the press release had been based on a simultaneous English interpretation of the diplomat’s comments in Arabic, and that the interpreter had made an error.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that the strike was directed at a site thought to be a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one in North Korea used for stockpiling nuclear weapons fuel.
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency has said it did not know about such a reactor and is checking the report with Damascus.
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