Ilya Tsukanov – March 5, 2021
The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the diplomatic wing of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), an Iran-listed domestic terrorist group, claims to have uncovered evidence of illegal activity at a secret Iranian nuclear facility.
In an online conference held Tuesday and picked up on by some US media, the NCRI provided information about an alleged deactivated nuclear site located in the Abadeh region in central Iran.
The analysis, complete with an examination of open-source intelligence, including Google Earth and DigitalGlobe satellite images, claims that the Abadeh site was previously overseen by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian nuclear scientist assassinated in an attack on his convoy outside Tehran late last year, and whom Israeli intelligence has alleged was the head of a secret Iranian nuclear programme.
The NCRI says the facility was built by companies controlled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and played a role in ‘Project Marivan’, an element “of the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons programme”.
Iran denies that it has any intention to pursue nuclear weapons, and its supreme leaders have issued fatwas (religious rulings compliance with which is mandatory) banning the development of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction.
The Abadeh site was supposedly been built for use by the Center for Research and Expansion of Technologies on Explosions and Impact (Persian acronym METFAZ), a subunit of the Organisation of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND), the research entity which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed was tasked with pursuing the development of nukes in his ‘Iran Lied’ speech in April 2018. The Trump administration is thought to have based its decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, at least in part, on this speech.
According to the NCRI, the Abadeh facility was “sanitised” in July 2019, prior to the arrival of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in August of that year.
