VIENNA, June 16: Iran continues to mislead the United Nations nuclear watchdog about its past and present nuclear activities, a senior US official said on Thursday. “It is evident that Iran has not come clean about its past or present nuclear activities,” US ambassador Jackie Sanders said in the written text of a speech to the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

In a speech to the board, IAEA’s deputy chief Pierre Goldschmidt said Tehran had admitted to misleading the IAEA about secret experiments in 1998 to create plutonium — which has few uses apart from fuelling atomic weapons — five years later than Iran had previously acknowledged.

Ms Sanders said: “Iran has also been caught, yet again, misleading the IAEA about its past plutonium separation experiments, claiming until confronted with scientific proof to the contrary that it stopped its undeclared reprocessing experiments in 1993.”

She said the plutonium work was ‘yet another previously unreported activity and another breach of Iran’s safeguards obligations’ under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

The IAEA has never said that these laboratory-scale experiments with plutonium were related to weapons development. But the United States, other countries and nuclear experts say that such work can have little civilian use.

Ms Sanders also called on Iran to accept the demands of France, Britain and Germany to terminate and dismantle its uranium enrichment programme and drop plans to build heavy-water nuclear reactor — two avenues to nuclear bomb fuel.

“We will not accept a nuclear weapons-capable Iran,” she said. —Reuters