Iran confirms damaged nuclear site was centrifuge facility

 Iran on Sunday confirmed that a damaged building at underground Natanz nuclear site was a new centrifuge assembly center, official IRNA news agency reported.

Iranian officials h previously sought to downplay fire, which erupted early on Thursday, calling it only an “incident” that affected an “industrial shed.” However, a released photo and video of site brocast by Iranian state television showed a two-story brick building with scorch marks and its roof apparently destroyed.

A spokesman for Iran’s nuclear agency, Behrouz Kamalvandi, said Sunday that work h begun on center in 2013 and it was inaugurated in 2018.

“More vanced centrifuge machines were intended to be built re," he said, ding that damage would “possibly cause a delay in development and production of vanced centrifuge machines in medium term.”

He said that fire h damaged “precision and measuring instruments,” and that center h not been operating at full capacity due to restrictions imposed by Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Iran began experimenting with vanced centrifuge models in wake of U.S. unilaterally withdrawing from deal two years ago.

Iran has long maintained its atomic program is for peaceful purposes.

An online video and messages purportedly claiming responsibility for fire were released Friday. multiple, different claims by a self-described group called “Cheetahs of Homeland," as well as fact that Iran experts have never heard of group before, raised questions about wher Natanz again h faced sabotage by a foreign nation, as it h during Stuxnet computer virus outbreak believed to have been engineered by U.S. and Israel.

Natanz fire also came less than a week after an explosion in an area east of Tehran that analysts believe hides an underground tunnel system and missile production sites .

Two U.S.-based analysts who spoke to Associated Press on Friday, relying on released pictures and satellite images, identified affected building as Natanz’s new Iran Centrifuge Assembly Center. A satellite image on Friday by Planet Labs Inc., annotated by experts at James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury Institute of International Studies, shows what appears to be damage done to half of building.

Destroying a centrifuge assembly facility could greatly impact Iran’s ability to more-quickly enrich greater amounts of uranium, which would be a goal for eir Israel or U.S.

Natanz today hosts country’s main uranium enrichment facility. In its long underground halls, centrifuges rapidly spin uranium hexafluoride gas to enrich uranium. Currently, IAEA says Iran enriches uranium to about 4.5% purity — above terms of nuclear deal but far below weapons-gre levels of 90%. Workers re also have conducted tests on vanced centrifuges, according to IAEA.