Iran halts IAEA inspection

“Iran has stopped all voluntary measures that it undertook in the past two-and-a-half to three years,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference. “We have no commitment to the Additional Protocol any more…We had two clear options. One was to decide to abandon our nuclear rights, the other to preserve our rights. We chose resistance,” Mottaki added.

The Security Council has the power to impose political and economic sanctions on Iran but there are divisions among its five permanent members—the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China—about how to deal with Tehran.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov on Sunday doubted sanctions would have much effect. Russia is helping build Iran’s only nuclear power station and Russia’s LUKOIL is investing in an Iranian oilfield. China gets 12 per cent of its oil imports from the Islamic Republic.

Ivanov said IAEA head Mohamed El Baradei wanted a reply to his questions before the agency’s governing board meets again in early March.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Sunday said nothing could deflect Tehran’s pursuit of atomic know-how.

“Content yourself with as many resolutions as you like, you cannot prevent the will of the Iranian people,” he said.

Iran has warned that any sanctions against it would send oil prices beyond a level industrialised economies could bear. Abdolrahim Moussavi, head of Iran’s joint chiefs of staff, warned that any military strike against Iran’s atomic facilities would be useless.

“We are not seeking a military confrontation, but if that happens we will give the enemy a lesson that will be remembered throughout history,” he was quoted as saying by the ISNA students news agency. —Reuters