UN turns up pressure on Iran’s N-activities

TEHRAN - Iran was under diplomatic pressure on Friday after a UN watchdog report said it had expanded its nuclear programme and was hampering inspections, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon in Tehran called on it to release political prisoners. Iranian officials responded by denying some of the charges in the International Atomic Energy Agency report, which they said was timed to steal the spotlight from a Non-Aligned Movement summit they were hosting. UN leader Ban Ki-moon called on Iran Friday to prove its nuclear program is peaceful after a UN watchdog said the Islamic state has stepped up its atomic drive. Ban, who pressed Iranian leaders over international suspicions of a bomb-making effort while at a summit in Tehran this week, expressed regret at the lack of progress between the government and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). It is “regrettable that Iran has yet to reach agreement with the IAEA on a plan to resolve all outstanding issues,” said a statement released by Ban’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky. Ban said there had to be “a diplomatic and negotiated solution” to the showdown.

“This must include measures by Iran aimed at building international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear program,” he added.

The statement comes in the wake of a new IAEA report that said Iran has doubled capacity at an underground nuclear facility and stepped up production of nuclear fuel. The United States, Britain, France and other western powers accuse Iran of seeking a nuclear bomb. But Tehran insists its effort is peaceful.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech attended by Ban at the Non-Aligned Movement summit this week that his country would “never” cease its nuclear activities. The IAEA report was released late on Thursday - in the middle of the summit - and said Iran had doubled its capacity to enrich uranium at its underground Fordo nuclear facility by installing, but not yet switching on, more than 1,000 more centrifuges. Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom said that Iran’s first atomic power plant, a symbol of what the Islamic Republic says is its peaceful nuclear ambition, is now operating at full capacity. It also said that UN inspectors wanting to see part of a military base in Parchin, outside Tehran, which is suspected of hosting tests of explosives that could be used in a nuclear warhead, had been “significantly hampered” by months of refused access.

Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi rejected the Parchin allegations, telling the ISNA news agency they had “no technical basis” and that “one cannot clean a site” of nuclear work.

Iranian officials have previously emphasised that Parchin is an off-limits military base and that the IAEA’s focus on it is overblown and based on “false” Western intelligence. Ban, in his speech at the Iranian diplomats’ college, expanded on criticism of Iran’s nuclear stand that he had delivered in meetings with Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and at the opening of the summit.

He urged Iran to comply with the IAEA and with UN resolutions on the issue, stressing the “cost of Iran’s current trajectory” and saying that “any country at odds with the international community... finds itself isolated from the thrust of common progress.”

On Friday, Khamenei said that US and Israel are responsible for the conflict scorching Syria by “flooding weapons” to rebels there. “The main and behind-the-scenes operators behind the painful issues in Syria are America and the Zionist regime,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a meeting with Syrian Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi on the sidelines of a NAM summit.

“The main operators in the Syrian issue are those who have been flooding weapons into Syria and financially backing the irresponsible groups,” he said.

Halaqi thanked Khamenei for Iran’s support, and delivered greetings from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who did not attend the NAM summit.