Syria denies UN nuclear watchdog access to military sites

        Syria said on Friday it was cooperating fully with a UN inquiry into its nuclear activity but would not go as far as opening up military sites because this would undermine its national security. Diplomats say the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has asked to examine several Syrian military installations, but the comments from Damascus clearly ruled this out. The Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog has been probing Syria since May over U.S. intelligence allegations that it almost built a secret, plutonium-producing reactor before Israel destroyed the site in an air strike a year ago. Syria - an ally of Iran, which is the subject of a much longer-running, and now stalled, IAEA investigation - has denied having a clandestine nuclear program. The IAEA said last week that preliminary findings from test samples taken by inspectors granted a visit to the desert location in June bore no traces of atomic activity. Syria says all that was there was a disused military building. "We would like to underline that my government is cooperating with the agency in full transparency and will follow suit all along the way," said Ibrahim Othman, director-general of Syria's Atomic Energy Commission. "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 told the annual meeting of the IAEA's 145-nation General Conference, or assembly, in Vienna. Diplomats close to the IAEA have said Syria has ignored agency requests to check three military installations believed connected to the alleged reactor site. An IAEA probe into unverified intelligence about covert atomic bomb research by Iran has hit the same stumbling block - the barring of inspectors from military sites to which the IAEA has no legal right of access without proof of nuclearization. Iran has dismissed the intelligence, provided by 10 countries, as fabricated. The IAEA says the allegations are "serious" but Iran has not supplied evidence to refute them. (16,15)