Abdul Qadeer Khan

Vienna, Nov. 17 (Reuters): Iran obtained weapons-grade uranium and a design for a nuclear bomb from a Pakistani scientist who has admitted to selling nuclear secrets abroad, an exiled Iranian Opposition group said today.

The group, which has given accurate information before, also said Iran is secretly enriching uranium at a military site previously unknown to the UN, despite promising France, Britain and Germany that it would halt all such work.

?(Abdul Qadeer) Khan gave Iran a quantity of HEU (highly enriched uranium) in 2001, so they already have some,? Farid Soleiman, a senior spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), said. ?I would doubt it was given enough for a weapon,? he added.

Soleiman said Khan, who ran a global nuclear black market that supplied Libya and Iran with uranium-enrichment technology until it was shut down earlier this year, also gave Iran a Chinese-developed warhead design sometime between 1994 and 1996.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said Khan?s network gave Libya the bomb design and is trying to find out whether Iran got it too. But it has no proof it did.

Pakistan?s mission to the UN in Vienna said it had no knowledge of this allegation and no information to provide.

IAEA officials, as well as Iran?s UN ambassador, were not immediately available for comment. Diplomats in Vienna who follow the IAEA, the UN nuclear watchdog, say the NCRI has been the best source of information on Tehran?s undeclared nuclear programme.

The NCRI, like Washington, accuses the Iranian government of of secretly developing atomic weapons. Tehran dismisses this allegation, insisting its nuclear programme is peaceful.

The NCRI is the political wing of the exiled group known as the People?s Mujahideen Organisation. Both are listed by the US state department as terrorist organisations.

Soleiman said Iran was enriching uranium, a process of purifying it for use as fuel for power plants or bombs, at a site in northeastern Tehran as part of a continuing covert programme to develop nuclear weapons.

?It continues to enrich uranium as we speak,? Soleiman said. He said the site had an unknown number of centrifuges, which purify uranium by spinning at supersonic speeds, as well as other technologies used to enrich uranium.