Iran arrests four over nuclear sabotage plot

TEHRAN – Iran has arrested four people for planning acts of sabotage at a nuclear site, a senior nuclear official announced on Sunday.

 

Ali Akbar Salehi, the director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said that the individuals were caught red-handed, before carrying out their plans. They are under interrogation, he added.

 

The suspects were identified and kept under surveillance some time ago and their arrest was postponed in order to obtain more information about them, he explained. 

 

Salehi refused to give more details on the specific target of the arrestees. 

 

“Given the intensive diplomatic efforts on the nuclear issue and promising signs about the future, certain countries will not sit idly by and are not interested in the settlement of Iran’s nuclear issue,” Salehi, a nuclear physicist and former foreign minister, noted. 

 

“They will make efforts to create stumbling blocks in the way of (resolving) Iran’s issue through acts of sabotage.”

 

Salehi went on to say that police and intelligence forces are constantly guarding the nuclear facilities to prevent any act of sabotage.

 

In September 2010, international news agencies reported that the Stuxnet computer virus, which according to former American officials was developed by the U.S. and Israel, had infected many industrial sites in Iran. 

 

Later, Western officials and media outlets claimed that the cyber attack had hindered Iran’s nuclear program. 

 

Iranian officials confirmed that some Iranian industrial systems had been targeted by a cyber attack, but insisted that no crashes or serious damage to the country’s industrial computer systems had been reported and said Iranian engineers had rooted out the problem.