A fire last week at the Natanz nuclear site, Iran’s main uranium enrichment facility, caused “significant” damage, the country’s nuclear agency said, lifting some of the mystery surrounding the event.
However, it is still unclear what exactly happened at the site in central Isfahan province. Iranian authorities at first seemed to downplay it, saying only that a fire had broken out early Thursday morning in an “industrial shed.”
But Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, told Iran’s official IRNA news agency in an interview on Sunday that the fire “caused significant financial damage but there were no casualties.”
Specifically, a building that produces advanced centrifuges, used in uranium enrichment, was damaged. Kamalvandi said measuring equipment and instruments were also destroyed.
“In the medium term, this may lead to a slowdown in the organization’s task, but we will make every effort to overcome this disruption,” he told IRNA, adding that Iran would rebuild the damaged building on larger ground.
The region remains on the brink for more than six months after a U.S. drone attack killed an Iranian general in Baghdad in January, and Tehran launched a retaliatory attack on U.S. forces in Iraq in an escalation of tensions that they threatened to take the region to war.
The Natanz fire came after reports of an explosion late last month near a missile installation on the outskirts of Parchin, southeast of Tehran. Iranian authorities said the explosion was caused by a gas tank explosion at a military complex.
On Saturday, another fire broke out at a power plant in the southwest. The incidents have sparked the spread of state-sponsored sabotage rumors.
Kamalvandi said Sunday that Iranian security forces know the cause of the incident but do not intend to comment due to security precautions.
The series of events at Iranian sites sparked speculation that Israel, as well as Saudi Arabia and the United States, could be behind the incidents.
When asked about the incident in Natanz on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Clearly, we cannot go into that.”
Israel is widely believed to be the region’s only nuclear power and has vowed never to allow Tehran to obtain atomic weapons. Many Israelis believe that Iran represents an existential threat to the world’s only Jewish state.
Last month, according to Reuters, Zeev Elkin, an Israeli security cabinet minister, said Iran had attempted to mount a cyber attack on Israel’s water system in April.
An Iranian official at the country’s UN mission denied that Tehran had been involved in the attack and said “Iran is not participating in any cyber warfare,” the semi-official Mehr news agency reported.
The latest back and forth comes when Israel launched a reconnaissance satellite into space on Monday.
“We are not going to compromise for a moment on our security efforts,” Netanyahu said. “The success of the Ofek 16 satellite greatly increases our ability to act against Israel’s enemies, both near and far.”
In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus, believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel, was discovered after it was used to attack Natanz.
Natanz is monitored by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog. Iran has always denied seeking nuclear weapons and maintains that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
A state department spokesman said he was “monitoring reports” of a fire at an Iranian nuclear facility.
“This incident serves as another reminder of how the Iranian regime continues to prioritize its wrong nuclear program to the detriment of the needs of the Iranian people,” the spokesperson said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the UN Security Council last Tuesday that Iran was developing a new centrifuge that could enrich uranium up to 50 times faster than it currently can.
Iran, he said, “showed no signs of slowing down its destabilization of nuclear escalation” and was accumulating “dangerous” knowledge.
Kamalvandi said Sunday that work began at the complex to produce advanced centrifuges at the Natanz site in 2013, but that construction was halted due to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
The 2015 deal eased U.S. and United Nations sanctions against Iran in exchange for the limits of its nuclear program. In May 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of the deal and imposed a wave of economic sanctions on the country’s oil and banking industries and other key sectors.
Kamalvandi said the complex was opened a month after the United States withdrew from the agreement, but that it had not been operating at full capacity due to restrictions imposed by the agreement. Iran remains a party to the agreement along with the United Kingdom, France, China, Russia and Germany.
Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Paul Goldman and Abigail Williams contributed
