‘Significant damages incurred’ at Iran nuclear plant

Iran has said the destruction of a top-secret facility working on advanced centrifuges will set its nuclear programme back, after satellite images showed the scale of the damage.

While authorities first blamed the Thursday incident on a fire at the plant in Natanz, aerial images now show the charred remains of a building at the centre of the development programme, with scattered debris indicating a large explosion.

Iran’s atomic agency spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi said there were “significant damages incurred… advanced equipment and precision measurement devices at this site were either destroyed or damaged”.

He added that it could result in “a delay in development and production of advanced centrifuge machines in the medium term”.

Suspicion immediately fell on Washington and Jerusalem, where Israeli ministers refused to comment on the incident, while not denying the country’s involvement.

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The Natanz site has been targeted by sophisticated cyber-attacks in the past, including the joint US-Israeli computer virus Stuxnet in 2010.

Analysts at the Institute for Science and International Security, a US-based think-tank, said the damaged building was a centrifuge rotor assembly facility inspected by the Atomic Energy Agency before Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 2015 nuclear deal under which inspections were made.

The blast – which was big enough to be detected from space – occurred at around 2am on Thursday morning. Images show the hangar door blown off, extensive scorch marks and a huge hole in the roof, revealing the internal cooling system.

Advanced centrifuges are used to speed up the enrichment of uranium, which could then be used in a nuclear bomb. Tehran denies that it is seeking an offensive atomic capability, a claim ridiculed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Natanz blast was just the latest incident at Iranian nuclear sites in recent days, fuelling suspicion of foul play, as an explosion rocked the Ahvas power plant, while a blast near the Parchin military base, where Iran develops ballistic missiles, was blamed on a gas leak.