Iran denies breach of ban on nuclear testing

Iran denied today that it had ended its co-operation with a UN watchdog charged with verifying a worldwide ban on nuclear tests…

Iran denied today that it had ended its co-operation with a UN watchdog charged with verifying a worldwide ban on nuclear tests.

A spokeswoman for the Vienna-based Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO), said on Friday that Tehran had stopped sending it data in January.

"The information is erroneous," Iran's permanent representative to the UN in Vienna, Mr Pirouz Hosseini, was quoted as saying by the state news agency IRNA.

He said Iran has always supplied data to the agency.

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The CTBTO, which has a global network of stations to verify that no nuclear tests take place, said the station in Iran, which began working in December 2001, had stopped transmitting information at the end of January.

It said Iran's suspension would not endanger the effectiveness of CTBTO's monitoring network overall as monitoring stations in neighbouring countries could detect any seismic activity related to a nuclear test.

AFP