Accident at Iran’s sensitive military Parchin site kills one engineer

DUBAI (Reuters) -An engineer died and another employee was injured after an accident on Wednesday in a research centre at the Parchin military site affiliated with Iran’s Defence Ministry, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on Thursday.

Fars news said investigations into the cause of the accident were under way.

Situated 60km (37 miles) southeast of Tehran, Parchin is a sensitive military site housing several industrial and research units, where Western security services believe Iran carried out tests related to nuclear bomb detonations more than a decade ago.

In 2015, Tehran allowed the U.N. nuclear watchdog to take environmental samples at the military site to make an assessment of “possible military dimensions” of Iran’s nuclear programme.

Iran says its nuclear program is solely for peaceful purposes.

In June 2020, an explosion caused by a tank leak occurred in the same area at a gas storage facility.

(Reporting by Dubai Newsroom)