Syria signals it will stop U.N. nuclear inspectors

Syria suggested that it won't give United Nations weapons inspectors further access to its military installations, undercutting a U.S.-led campaign to uncover an alleged secret nuclear program run by Damascus.

The lack of access, and the assassination of a Syrian general who was a key contact on the nuclear issue, raise doubts that inspectors will be able to learn the exact nature of a facility Israel bombed last year. The Bush administration has said the site was a nuclear reactor being developed by Damascus in cooperation with North Korea.

Ibrahim Othman, director-general of Syria's Atomic Energy Commission, said on Friday that his country is cooperating with the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency. "However, this cooperation will not in any way come at the expense of exposing our military sites or causing a threat to our national security," he said at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna.

The Bush administration wants the IAEA to push more aggressively for access to suspected nuclear facilities inside Syria.

"We still have serious concerns. The Syrians have not cooperated with the IAEA," John Rood, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said in an interview on Thursday. "The IAEA has been to only one place" inside Syria.

Syrian officials said the bombed facility was a non-nuclear military site. They allege that the U.S. is hyping charges of Syrian nuclear activity.

"After destroying this target, you go to the nuclear agency and say this is a nuclear target. You should do it before," Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said in a recent interview.

The IAEA acknowledged that it was facing difficulties in its Syria investigation during its quarterly Board of Governors meeting in Vienna last week.

Israel has never publicly detailed its reasons for the September 2007 Syria bombing. This April, the Bush administration briefed Congress and the media on the intelligence they had gathered on the site, known as Al Kibar, near the Euphrates River in eastern Syria. It shared with the IAEA photographs and slides, made before the bombing, of a facility under construction that appeared to be the same size and configuration as North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

The U.S. also provided what it said was evidence of repeated visits by North Korea nuclear officials to Syria over more then a decade.

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