Leaked Saudi memo claims Iran sent nuke equipment to Sudan

Iran shipped advanced nuclear equipment to Sudan in 2012, according to a leaked document purportedly written by diplomats at the Saudi Arabian embassy in Khartoum at the time.

The memo, dated February 2012 and marked as “very secret,” was leaked last week by the WikiLeaks groups along with what it claimed were 60,000 other official Saudi communications over the weekend.

“The embassy’s sources advised that Iranian containers arrived this week at Khartoum airport containing sensitive technical equipment in the form of fast centrifuges for enriching uranium, and a second shipment is expected to arrive this week,” the document read, according to a Reuters report.

Even if authentic, the message does not include details on where the Saudi diplomats sourced their information or any particular details of the shipment that could be verified.

Sudan does not have its own nuclear program and there have not been previous claims that Iran sent nuclear-related equipment to the country.

Wikileaks intends to publish a total of 500,000 Saudi documents.

Saudi Arabia has not commented on any of the documents in particular but noted that they might be fake.

Sudanese and Iranian officials also would not comment on the leaked memo about the shipment, the report said.

In October 2012 Sudan claimed an Israeli airstrike was responsible for causing a massive explosion that devastated an arms factory south of the Khartoum.

Israel neither confirmed nor denied involvement in the explosion at the factory, which destroyed much of the complex and killed four people in the Sudanese capital.

But Israeli officials claimed that Sudan plays a key role in an Iranian-backed network of arms shipments to Hezbollah and Hamas, leading to speculation at the time that destroying those weapons was the objective.

Iran is in intensive negotiations with Britain, the US, France, China, Russia, and Germany to hammer out an agreement aimed at rolling back its nuclear program that the so-called P5+1 nations fear is directed towards producing atomic weapons. Iran, which claims its research is for peaceful purposes, has balked at demands for extensive inspections of its nuclear sites by international monitors.

Negotiators hope to ink a deal by a June 30 deadline, based on a framework agreement reached in April. Among the conditions of the earlier agreement was a demand that Iran deactivate most of its thousands of centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium, a key component of a nuclear bomb.