The New York Times has released satellite records of entrances to tunnels located near a site that exploded last July • Expert: "The facility is protected from airstrikes"
Satellite documentation presented by The New York Times on the nuclear facility // screenshot
Iran continues bombing:
A few months after the centrifugal facility near Natanz exploded, the Iranians are rehabilitating the rubble - underground.
The New York Times report shows satellite documentation of entrances to tunnels located on a mountain ridge near the site of the nuclear facility where an explosion occurred last July.
Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons control expert at the Mildbury Institute, told the New York Times: "The new facility may be a much safer place to assemble the centrifuges, as it is located far from a road and the ridge protects the facility from air attack."
In analyzing the photographs, which were taken over months, Lewis noted that they appear to document "two tunnel entrances on either side of a large ridge, the space between which is large enough to accommodate a facility of the same size as a building destroyed in the summer."
He also pointed to excavation findings documented in the area and roads on both sides of the ridge leading to the same entrances to the tunnels.
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The report came about three months after the chairman of Iran's Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Akbar Salahi, announced that his country had begun construction of a new facility for the production of advanced centrifuges at the site of the site that exploded in July near the town of Natanz.
"It has been decided to build a more advanced, larger and more comprehensive production hall in all aspects in the heart of the mountains near Natanz. Of course, work on the facility has already begun," Salahi said in an interview with the state television network.
A spokesman for Iran's atomic energy organization, Bruz Kamalwandi, claimed that security intelligence agencies had identified the elements behind the explosion at the Natanz facility.
In an interview broadcast on television and translated by the Jerusalem Center for Public and State Affairs, Kamalwandi said that "what is clear is that an explosion occurred in Natanz (the nuclear site), but security officials will announce at the appropriate time how and in what materials the explosion occurred and what the details are."
In July, senior Iranian officials admitted that the explosion at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility caused severe damage, the New York Times reported that month, an intelligence source in the Middle East, with knowledge of the unusual incident in Iran, claimed Israel was responsible for the attack in the Natanz compound.
The blast occurred in early July and began with the taking responsibility of an unidentified opposition organization called the Panthers of the Nation, which claimed to have managed to infiltrate the reserved base, located in a desert and inaccessible area of Iran, and carry out a Haballah operation.
The blast came just days after an explosion and fire at the missile base in the Perchin complex south of the Iranian capital Tehran.
The construction of the new facility inside an underground site in the mountains means that such a facility will be more protected from the possibility of sabotage or damage from the air.
Iran has a number of sensitive nuclear sites as well as many ballistic missile sites below the surface, in order to protect them in the event of a series of airstrikes.