SYRIA has razed the site of what might have been a secret nuclear reactor that was bombed by Israel last month, according to a US-based atomic research institute.
In commercial satellite images taken on Wednesday and released by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), the suspected reactor building visible before the 6 September Israeli air raid had vanished.
An image showed tractors o
r bulldozers and scrape marks on the ground where the building had stood before the air attack. The site is in a remote corner of north-east Syria near the Euphrates River, about 90 miles from the Iraq border.
Shlomo Brom, a senior analyst at the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv, said the images "furnish quite strong proof that there was something dirty going on there".
"By destroying the building the Syrians, in their stupidity, have strengthened the justification for the Israeli action," he said.
Mr Brom, formerly chief of strategic planning for the Israeli army, added: "According to most indications, this was a nuclear reactor built along the North Korean model that was meant to produce plutonium."
A report by ISIS, which tracks activity that could pose bomb proliferation threats, said: "Dismantling and removing the building at such a rapid pace dramatically complicates inspection of the facilities and suggests Syria may be trying to hide whatever was there."
It added that what appeared in the pictures to be a trench might point to the Syrians excavating buried pipes running between the demolished building and a nearby structure, which is still standing and could have been a pumping station to supply water to the reactor.
However, a senior diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the satellite images "do not necessarily make this site a nuclear one". He added that the IAEA is undertaking a detailed analysis.
Syria has denied hiding a nuclear site from the IAEA and said the only facility in the area was a desertification research centre.
The Israeli government said only that the airforce carried out a strike in Syria on 6 September. it did not specify the target. Strict censorship has been imposed on the Israeli media's reporting of the incident, making Israeli analysts reliant on foreign press reports.
ISIS, headed by former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright, was the first to pinpoint publicly what Israeli warplanes had targeted.
It said in an earlier report that the site resembled a North Korean gas graphite nuclear reactor in design.
However, experts have urged caution in interpreting the images, saying that the type of nuclear reactor favoured by North Korea has few identifying characteristics visible from the air.
Mr Brom said it was too early to say whether the Israeli air strike would deter Syria from building a nuclear reactor in the future.
But he said the absence of a Syrian response to such a "serious provocation" suggested Damascus had been deterred by Israel's military power.
Earlier this month, the New York Times quoted US officials as saying the Israeli strike had targeted a partially built nuclear reactor made with North Korean help that was years away from completion.
The Israeli army on Thursday cancelled a large-scale military exercise due to take place on the occupied Golan Heights, seized from Syria in 1967, so as not to increase tensions with Damascus, defence officials said. Israeli media reports said the exercise, for which reservists have been called up, would instead take place in Israel's northern Galilee region. It is to be the largest Israeli military manoeuvre since the 2006 war with Hezbollah.
