UN nuclear chief in Iran as it menaces IAEA cameras

The head of the United Nations' nuclear watchdog met Sunday with Iranian officials in a bid to preserve his inspectors' ability to monitor Tehran's atomic program, even as authorities said they planned to cut off surveillance cameras at those sites.

Rafael Grossi's arrival in Tehran comes as Iran tries to pressure Europe and the new Biden administration into returning to the 2015 nuclear deal, from which former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America in 2018.

Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who helped negotiate the agreement, said the cameras of the International Atomic Energy Agency would be shut off despite Grossi's visit.

Zarif said this was to comply with a law passed by Iran's parliament.

"We have a democracy," he told the govenrment-run English-language broadcaster Press TV.

"We are supposed to implement the laws of the country. And the parliament adopted legislation, whether we like it or not,"

He insisted it was not a deadline or an ultimatum.

Zarif's comments marked the highest-level acknowledgement yet of what Iran planned to do when it stopped following the so-called “Additional Protocol,” a confidential agreement between Tehran and the IAEA reached as part of the nuclear deal.

The IAEA has additional protocols with a number of countries it monitors.

Under the protocol with Iran, the IAEA “collects and analyzes hundreds of thousands of images captured daily by its sophisticated surveillance cameras,” the agency said in 2017.

The agency also said then that it had placed “2,000 tamper-proof seals on nuclear material and equipment.”

In his interview with Press TV, Zarif said authorities would be “required by law not to provide the tapes of those cameras”.

It wasn't immediately clear if that also meant the cameras would be turned off entirely. Zarif called that a “technical decision... not a political decision.”

The Vienna-based IAEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Zarif's comments.

The agency last week said the visit was aimed at finding “a mutually agreeable solution for the IAEA to continue essential verification activities in the country.”

There are 18 nuclear facilities and nine other locations in Iran under IAEA safeguards.

Iran’s parliament in December approved a bill that would suspend part of U.N. inspections of its nuclear facilities if European signatories do not provide relief from oil and banking sanctions by Tuesday.