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Damascus/Seoul: Syria's government on Friday denied US allegations that it was involved in a clandestine nuclear programme with North Korea and accused Washington of misleading Congress about the country's nuclear activity.
The Damascus government also accused the US of aiding Israel in last year's bombing of its territory.
Seven months after the bombing, the Bush administration said on Thursday that North Korea was secretly assisting work on a nuclear reactor in Syria and the facility destroyed by Israel was not intended for "peaceful purposes." Syria has maintained in the past that the site was an unused military facility.
An unnamed Syrian government official, in a statement carried on Friday by the state news agency Sana, denied the US allegations.
"This campaign launched by the US administration is aimed primarily at misguiding the US Congress and international public opinion ... in order to justify the Israeli raid on Syria in September last year, which this administration apparently was involved in executing," the statement said.
A similar statement was issued on Thursday by the Syrian embassy in Washington.
Senior US officials said the US military was not involved in the attack, and the US government, although informed in advance, did not approve it.
Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, in excerpts of a newspaper interview released yesterday, scoffed at the US claims that his country was building a nuclear reactor with North Korean assistance. He reiterated that the site destroyed by the Israelis was "a Syrian military position under construction and not a nuclear reactor." "Is it logical for a nuclear site to be left without protection and not guarded by anti-aircraft guns?" Bashar said in the interview with the Qatari newspaper Al Watan.
"A nuclear site under the watch of satellites in the middle of Syria in the desert and in an open location?" he added sarcastically.
The Syrian reactor was within weeks or months of being functional when Israeli jets destroyed it, a top US official in Washington told The Associated Press. The official said the facility was mostly completed but still had needed significant testing before it could have been declared operational.
The Bush administration said that after the reactor was damaged beyond repair, Syria tried to bury evidence of its existence. The US said Syria must come clean before the world about its nuclear activities.
Meanwhile, South Korea's top nuclear envoy said that allegations of nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Syria were credible and urged Pyongyang to fulfil a promise to declare all its atomic programmes.
"I think it's credible," Kim Sook said in a telephone interview, noting the regular exchange of information between longtime allies South Korea and the US.
The US officials presented photographs, which they said showed that the Syrian facility matched designs from the North's main nuclear site at Yongbyon.
"We share the concern expressed by the US government about the North Korean nuclear weapons programme and nuclear proliferation activities," Kim said. "North Korea should come forward and account for all nuclear weapons programmes in a verifiable manner."
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