Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has voiced strong protest against a report that the International Atomic Energy Agency issued against Tehran’s peaceful nuclear program, saying the IAEA shouldn’t allow the erosion of its credibility as a result of political motives and pressures from certain member states.
Araghchi made the remarks in a trilateral meeting with the IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi and his Egyptian counterpart Badr Abdelatty on Monday in Cairo, where he is on an official visit.
The top Iranian diplomat reminded the UN nuclear body and its chief of their duty to professionally carry out their statutory duties, criticizing the baseless allegations brought up in the latest report by the IAEA chief about Iran.
Araghchi said the “IAEA should not allow its credibility to be undercut by political motives and pressures from some member states.”
For his part, Grossi said he had held a timely meeting with the Iranian foreign minister in Cairo.
“Timely meeting in Cairo with Egypt’s @MfaEgypt Badr Abdelatty and Iran’s Foreign Minister @araghchi,” Grossi wrote in a post on his official account on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter.
“Grateful for Egypt’s constructive role in supporting peaceful, diplomatic solutions to regional challenges,” the IAEA chief added.
Speaking in a television interview, Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), pointed to the IAEA’s report on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities, expressing dissatisfaction with the document’s political nature and citing Western and Israeli footprints in its development.
He noted that the document had been devised in line with “the same maximum pressure policy” that the United States was leading against the country with the help of its allies.
Eslami identified those involved in pressuring the IAEA into releasing the report as “the United States and the three European countries (the UK, France, and Germany),” namely Washington’s closest European allies.
The Western pressure, he added, had been employed on the agency “under the influence of the Zionist regime [of Israel].”
“Under the same influence and pressure, the agency has released a detailed report, which is a mix of accusations and the same repeated issues from the past,” Eslami noted.
Tehran maintains that the IAEA should adopt an equal approach towards all of its members, including the Israeli regime – a non-signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that possesses an extensive nuclear arsenal, and regularly threatens military aggression against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities.
