MOSCOW, March 28 – The situation at Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant continues to deteriorate and attacks pose a direct threat to nuclear safety, the head of Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom said on Saturday after another strike near the facility.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said on Friday that Iran had informed it of another strike in the vicinity of Bushehr, the third such incident in 10 days, with no damage to the operating reactor and no release of radiation reported.
The Russian Foreign Ministry on Saturday called for “unequivocal and firm condemnation” of the attack near Bushehr.
“We hope that, by receiving timely and objective information directly from the Iranian authorities about what is happening on the ground, the Director General of the IAEA will be able to convey a simple message to the aggressors immediately and unequivocally: ‘It is time for you to stop!’,” its spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in a statement.
Rosatom head Alexei Likhachev also said that 163 more of its staff from Bushehr had returned to Russia after an evacuation, and that two more groups would be evacuated in the coming days.
(Reporting by Anastasia Lyrchikova; Writing by Ksenia Orlova; Editing by Jan Harvey)
