VIENNA, Aug 29: The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog said in comments aired on Friday that Iran had shopped for nuclear components on the international black market and called on Tehran to be more “proactive” and “transparent”.

In an interview on the BBC television programme Hardtalk, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei also said that Iran’s nuclear programme had been going on far longer than the agency had realized.

Although he was not certain of the countries that made the equipment Iran had acquired on the black market, Mr ElBaradei said he had a “pretty good idea” which ones they were.

“It could be one country, it could be more than one country,” ElBaradei said. “They (Iran) told us they have got a lot of that stuff from the black market. It is through intermediaries. It is not directly from the country.”

Although he stopped short of accusing Tehran of lying to the U.N. agency, ElBaradei said Iran had failed to give the IAEA a complete picture of its nuclear programme, which Washington says is merely a front for a secret atomic weapons programme.

“They have not really been fully transparent in telling us in advance what was going on,” Mr ElBaradei said in the interview, recorded on Thursday and aired on Friday.

Asked if he believed Iran was running a secret weapons programme, ElBaradei said: “It might be, it might not be.”

“I need to really get the Iranians to tell me the full, complete story,” he said. “And I would like Iran to be more proactive, more transparent.”

He said that it would have been much easier to verify Iran’s insistence its nuclear programme is peaceful if it had given the IAEA a complete picture of its atomic plans from the beginning.

“It would have been easier for us to complete our job if we knew what was going on as early as the mid 1980s,” Mr ElBaradei said. “Now we have to go... 20 years back.”—Reuters