Tehran, Sept 13: Iran's ambassador to the UN's nuclear watchdog has angrily hit back at the imposition of an October 31 deadline on the Islamic republic to prove it is not secretly developing atomic weapons, saying the demand was political and could not be met. "Iran cannot take part in a political process," Ali Akbar Salehi told the country's official news agency in an interview after he walked out of yesterday's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting in Vienna.
The IAEA has given Iran until the end of October to prove it is not running a covert nuclear weapons programme, and IAEA director Mohamed Elbaradei has warned Iran it could be declared to be in non-compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) if it failed to answer all the agency's questions on its nuclear activities.
But Salehi said the resolution was unacceptable. "Some of the articles are in breach of international regulations and oppose the spirit of the NPT agreement. Iran opposes ... The content of the resolution," he said, accusing some western states of not wishing "to resolve the issue technically and legally".
"The western group in the (IAEA) board of governors, in line with their political goals, have made illegitimate, illegal and impractical requests from Iran," he said, labelling the United States, Britain, Germany and France as "extremist countries". "Even if all the claims on Iran's programme's shortcomings are true, they cannot be resolved within the 45 days given to Iran," he said. Bureau Report