TEHRAN, Jan 12: Inspectors from the UN atomic watchdog arrived in Tehran on Wednesday to visit a military site the United States claims may be involved in covert nuclear weapons activities, student news agency ISNA reported.

"The group of inspectors are to stay in Iran for a week and they will start taking environmental samples from Parchin on Thursday," ISNA said. Iran said on Sunday it had given the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) permission to take so-called environmental samples from the Parchin site south east of Tehran in order to disprove US allegations of secret weapons-related activities.

Environmental sampling involves taking swabs or soil samples to detect the presence of nuclear activity. "The question is not of a visit to the military installations of Parchin.

The agency had asked to take samples from the green areas of Parchin because the Americans and others have made accusations," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters on Sunday.

"To demonstrate that we have nothing to hide and that the Iranian nuclear program is peaceful, we have authorized the agency to take these samples," he added. Parchin is an example of a so-called "transparency visit" where the IAEA is going beyond its mandate under the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to check if nuclear materials have been diverted away from peaceful use.

Tehran has strongly denied carrying out any nuclear-related work at the site. The United States has alleged the Iranians may be working on testing high-explosive charges with an inert core of depleted uranium at Parchin as a sort of dry test for how a bomb with fissile material would work. -AFP