Iran vows to follow nuclear path despite sanctions

TEHRAN - Iranian leaders vowed on Wednesday to press on with Tehran's disputed nuclear work regardless of any new U.N. sanctions, one day after world powers agreed the outline of a new resolution.

"The Iranian nation has chosen its path and will continue with it," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the students news agency ISNA.

"Such illegal behaviour (by Western powers) ... will not divert the Iranian nation from its path."

The United States and other Western powers fear Iran's nuclear activities are aimed at building nuclear weapons. Iran, the world's fourth-largest crude oil exporter, says its nuclear programme is intended to generate electricity.

World powers agreed on Tuesday on the outline of a third sanctions resolution against Iran, but diplomats said the draft did not contain the punitive economic measures that Washington had been pushing for.

Ahmadinejad called on major powers to avoid repeating past "mistakes".

"We advise them not to repeat their previous mistakes ... They cannot make up for the past with a new mistake," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

The West has faced a diplomatic showdown with Iran since 2002 and the U.N. Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions, in December 2006 and March 2007.

Washington has spearheaded a drive for new sanctions and had been pushing for a new resolution to impose a ban on business with leading Iranian state banks.

But that drive appears to have failed. Russia and China, both commercial partners of Iran, have hardened their opposition to tough sanctions since a U.S. intelligence report last month said Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

"NOT TOUGH"

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin on Tuesday after a nearly two-hour meeting with his counterparts from Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, that the new draft of a sanctions resolution would be presented to the U.N. Security Council in the coming weeks.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the new draft resolution was not tough or punitive and "welcomes the progress made between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency

(IAEA) ..."

"The measures in this draft do not have a tough sanctioning character," Lavrov said.

He said the new draft resolution would "call on countries to be alert in their transport relations with Iran so that those relations are not used to transport (potentially dangerous) materials".

His remarks suggested the United States failed to win agreement in Berlin on punitive economic sanctions against Iran.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator said Tehran had exceeded its international obligations on its nuclear dossier.

"Iran has gone beyond its obligations," Saeed Jalili told a committee of the European Parliament during a visit to Brussels. He was expected to meet European Union Foreign Policy Chief Javier Solana in the Belgian capital later on Wednesday.

"Everyone acknowledges those activities are peaceful," Jalili, referring to Iran's nuclear activities. He reiterated Tehran's belief that Iran had a right to enrich uranium.

IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei won agreement from Iran this month to answer remaining questions about its past covert nuclear work within four weeks.

Western diplomats say expectations are low that leaders in Tehran will be forthcoming, but Iran says it has accelerated its cooperation with the IAEA since then. Ahmadinejad said Iran had "good" cooperation with the agency.

On Wednesday, diplomats familiar with IAEA-Iran relations told Reuters Iran has allowed top U.N. nuclear monitors to visit an advanced centrifuge development site for the first time in a gesture of transparency about its disputed atomic drive.