Iranian official slams IAEA chief for making “political comments”

The spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran criticized what he calls the sentimental statement of the IAEA chief on Iran’s decision to bar some Western inspectors of the agency from entering the country.

Behrouz Kamalvandi said under Article 9 of the Safeguards Agreement, each country has a right to accept or reject the proposed inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and can even reverse its decision after accepting them.

Kamavandi added that this sovereign right is not limited to Iran and all countries are entitled to make such a decision.

“Exercising our legal right, we canceled visits by inspectors from Germany and France, but unfortunately, due to the biased report of the IAEA chief and his failure to acknowledge that all countries have such a right, a propaganda campaign was waged against us”, Kamalvandi noted.

He stressed that European countries jumped on the issue to put pressure on Iran.

Kamalvandi reminded IAEA Director General Rafael Gross of tasks which, he said, are limited to technical measures.

“The director general should present genuine reports without becoming emotional, but unfortunately, we saw that Grossi recently spoke about understandings that are basically at odds with his responsibility, and as a rule of thumb, he should not have made such political comments,” said Kamalvandi.

He further underlined that up until now, no IAEA chief has spoken about JCPOA 2, and such a statement is weird and unexpected.

He was referring to the Iran nuclear deal.

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