CAIRO, June 22 (Reuters) – The U.N. nuclear watchdog is ready to cooperate with plans to build nuclear power plants in Egypt, which is now working on locations for construction, the head of the U.N. body said on Tuesday.
Egypt said in March it planned to build four plants by 2025 and inaugurate the first in 2019 in an effort to reduce the most populous Arab country’s reliance on oil and gas. Officials hope the programme would add capacity of up to 4,000 megawatts.
“The IAEA is very happy to cooperate with Egypt in its project of introducing nuclear power. Now Egypt is finalizing its plan of choosing the site for its nuclear plant,” said Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Speaking after talks with Egyptian officials, he told reporters he had proposed sending a mission to Egypt. He did not give details.
The official state news agency MENA also quoted Electricity and Energy Minister Hassan Ahmed Younes saying the IAEA had voiced its full support of Egypt’s nuclear programme.
Egypt, with 78 million peopled, has signed a nuclear power consultancy deal with Australia’s WorleyParsons (WOR.AX).
The deal, reached last year, includes looking for potential locations and updating studies on the Dabaa site on the Mediterranean coast, where Egypt planned to build a power station in the 1980s.
Egypt has long pressed for making the Middle East a nuclear-weapons-free zone and backed plans for a U.N.-sponsored conference for Middle East states in 2012 on the issue.
Israel is widely believed to have the region’s only nuclear arsenal. Western powers suspect Iran of developing nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian programme. Tehran denies such ambitions.
“In the upcoming conference in 2012 of the creation of a nuclear free zone, we have further discussed the aid that the agency could extend to Egypt,” Amano said. (Reporting by Marwa Awad, writing by Edmund Blair)
ROUNDUP: Prosecutor accuses Hezbollah of plotting attacks in Egypt
Cairo – Egypt’s public prosecutor on Wednesday accused Hezbollah of sending operatives to Egypt to carry out attacks in the country and to smuggle weapons and money to Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
In a statement released Wednesday evening Abdel-Magid Mohammed accused Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah of dispatching agents to Egypt during Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The militants were to recruit local agents to conduct attacks, to incite the people and the armed forces to revolt, to spy on Egypt and to smuggle weapons and cash to Hamas in the Gaza Strip, he said.
The statement added that the prosecutor had received “certain information” from Egypt’s domestic intelligence service, State Security Investigations, that a Hezbollah cell had rented apartments overlooking the Suez Canal in order to spy on traffic through the canal.
It also accused them of spying on resorts in Sinai, and renting rooms in fashionable districts where Hezbollah agents held training workshops on spreading Shiite thought in Egypt.
Hezbollah’s spokesman in Beirut did not answer repeated requests for comment from the German Press Agency dpa on Wednesday evening.
Earlier on Wednesday morning, two sources in the Egyptian Interior Ministry and an Islamist lawyer told dpa that State Security had detained 49 people – including 41 Egyptians, seven Palestinians with Israeli passports, and one Lebanese man – in December on suspicion of smuggling weapons and money to Hamas.
A spokesman from the Israeli Embassy in Cairo told dpa the embassy was working with the Egyptian authorities to find out more information about the detentions.
Montasser al-Zayat, a former member of the Islamist group Gamaa al-Islamiya and a former associate of deputy al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, on Wednesday told dpa that the brother of the Lebanese detainee had asked him to represent the detainees, but that he had not had access to them.
Egypt’s public prosecutor on Wednesday evening said that Egypt’s High State Security prosecutor was interrogating “around 49 suspects,” that the Lawyer’s Syndicate had been duly notified of the men’s detention and that the prosecutor had received no petition from a lawyer seeking access to the detainees.
“Investigations revealed that Nasrallah had dispatched the agents after his speech … and that he had planned to incite the people and military forces to rebel against the regime,” Egypt’s public prosecutor said in the statement, claiming that the arrests had foiled Nasrallah’s plans.
“If the people took to the streets by the millions, could the police kill millions of Egyptians?” Nasrallah asked in a televised address at the beginning of Israel’s offensive in Gaza in December. “People of Egypt, you must open this border by the force of your chests.” (dpa)