U.S. Urges Syria To `Cooperate Fully` With IAEA

Syria has denied any covert nuclear arms project.

The United States urged Syria on Monday to cooperate fully with U.N. inspectors looking into U.S. allegations that Damascus secretly built a nuclear reactor and to allow Syrian officials to be interviewed.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said a team from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency will visit Syria June 22-24 to pursue an investigation into the suspected reactor site, which Israel destroyed in an air raid in September.

IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei did not say whether Syria, which had not responded for months to IAEA requests for access, would allow U.N. investigators to examine the al-Kibar site in the country's remote northeast desert.

Syria has denied any covert nuclear arms project.

U.S. intelligence officials in April said they believed Syria had built the suspected reactor with the assistance of North Korea, which later also helped in cleaning up the site after the Israeli strike.

"We would of course encourage them not only to let the inspectors in but to cooperate fully with the inspectors, allow them to do their job ... in order to produce an authoritative report," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

"Let's hope that the Syrian efforts haven't been too effective in covering up what it is they are trying to cover up: the nuclear facility -- reactor," he added.

"There were people, surely, who worked on that reactor and who have intimate knowledge and can provide the IAEA important information and let's hope that those people not only are made available to the IAEA but are entirely forthcoming," he said.

The United States is seeking to get North Korea to disclose all its atomic programs, including any nuclear proliferation to other nations, as part of a 2005 multilateral agreement under which Pyongyang promised to abandon its nuclear programs.