A sabotage attempt on one of the facilities of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization failed Wednesday and there were no casualties or damage, Iranian media reported, adding the event is being investigated.
The unspecified threat was “neutralized before it damaged the building, and the saboteurs failed to carry out their plan,” the ISNA news agency reported.
Iran’s state-run Mehr News Agency said the saboteurs had employed a quadcopter to attack the building, located near Karaj City on the outskirts of the capital of Tehran. which was eventually shot down.
The news comes amid indirect talks in Vienna between Iran and the U.S. to return to the tattered 2015 JCPOA nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018.
Also on Wednesday, Iran claimed the U.S. had offered to remove 1,040 sanctions that were imposed under Donald Trump, including removing senior figures from a blacklist.
Raisi, has declared Iran will not agree to restrictions on its ballistic missile development or its support for terror proxies throughout the region as a condition for returning to the nuclear deal.
Following the election of hardliner Ebrahim Raisi as the next Iranian president, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett this week warned against Iran‘s “regime of executioners” obtaining a nuclear bomb, and said Raisi’s election should be a “wake up call” for western powers hoping to resuscitate the deal.
An April 11 blast at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran saw the power supply cut and thousands of centrifuges destroyed, reportedly setting back the country’s nuclear program by nine months.
Iran initially downplayed that attack, saying little damage was done.
It later blamed Israel for the attack and retaliated by enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, a short technical step away from the 90 percent needed to build a bomb.
Earlier this week Iran’s southern Bushehr nuclear power plant was temporarily shut down over a “technical fault,” the AEO said in a statement.
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