The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog says inspectors have not found evidence of a coordinated Iranian programme to build nuclear weapons, despite Israeli and US claims, Al Jazeera reports.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi has told NBC News that the agency had not identified “elements of a systematic and structured programme to manufacture nuclear weapons” in Iran.

At the same time, he has confirmed that Tehran enriched uranium to 60 per cent purity — a level far beyond civilian energy needs — and that such enrichment is something “only countries with nuclear weapons have”.

He stresses that inspectors could not conclude whether Iran intends to build a bomb, but said the stockpiling raised serious questions.

This enrichment, he has said, was “the source of the concerns we had”, and there was “no clear objective” for accumulating material at that level.

“The centrifuges were spinning constantly and producing more and more of that material,” he said, adding that theoretically this would have been “enough to produce more than 10 nuclear warheads. But do they have them? No.”