Syria rejects ‘mere lies’ about secret nuclear facility

Syrian state media on Monday denied a report published in Der Spiegel over the weekend which claimed that Damascus was building a secret underground nuclear weapons facility.

An unnamed “media source” was quoted by the Sana news agency denying the Der Spiegel report and calling the claims “mere lies.”

Der Spiegel said in the report that Syrian President Bashar Assad was pushing ahead full steam to produce nuclear weapons at a secret facility near the town of Qusayr with help from Iran and North Korea.

“Syria refutes these allegations in their entirety, asserting that the allegations, which were made by a magazine that often publishes preposterous allegations devoid of credibility, contradict the most basic rules of journalism ethics, and that they are part of the conspiracy and media misdirection campaign targeting Syria,” the report said.

Earlier on Monday Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also rejected the report, which he said aimed to discredit the Islamic Republic’s own contested nuclear program.

“The magazine’s allegation is one of the attempts made by those circles whose life has been based on violence and fear to cloud the international community with illusion and create imaginary concerns about the Islamic Republic, and this is a ridiculous claim,” Zarif was quoted by the semi-official Fars news agency as saying.

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Friday’s Der Spiegel report said that intelligence suggests that Syrian President Bashar Assad is building a secret underground plant with the aim of developing nuclear weapons.

The Lebanese terror group Hezbollah, which supports Assad’s regime in the bloody conflict in Syria, is guarding the secret project, it added.

Citing information made available by unidentified intelligence sources, Der Spiegel said the plant was in an inaccessible mountain region in the west of the war-ravaged country, two kilometers (1.2 miles) from the Lebanese border.

It is deep underground, near the town of Qusayr and has access to electricity and water supplies, the magazine said in a pre-released version of the story made available ahead of Saturday’s publication.

It said it had had access to “exclusive documents,” satellite photographs and intercepted conversations thanks to intelligence sources.

Western experts suspect, based on the documents, that a reactor or an enrichment plant could be the aim of the project, whose codename is “Zamzam,” Der Spiegel said.

The Syrian regime has transferred 8,000 fuel rods to the plant that had been planned for a facility at Al-Kibar, it added.

In 2007, a bombing raid on an undeclared Syrian nuclear facility at al-Kibar was widely understood to have been an Israeli strike, but it was never acknowledged by the Jewish state.

Der Spiegel said North Korean and Iranian experts are thought to be part of the “Zamzam” project.