As Protesters Jeer, Ahmadinejad Denies Iran Wants Nuclear Weapons

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, told Americans yesterday his country had no nuclear weapons program, but then called his own credibility into question by insisting it had no gay people either.

The claim came in the midst of a bad-tempered occasion at Columbia University, where the Iranian leader had been invited to speak but was denounced before he began as a "petty and cruel dictator" by the university dean.

In the course of a damning introduction, the Columbia dean, Lee Bollinger, who had been criticized for inviting Mr Ahmadinejad told him he must be "brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated" to persist in questioning the facts of the Holocaust. In response, Mr Ahmadinejad criticized Mr Bollinger for insulting him and "insulting the intelligence of the audience" by attempting to "inoculate" them against the Iranian leader's views.

With demonstrators jeering outside the university buildings, he went on to repeat his calls for more research into the Holocaust, and delivered a soliloquy on the nature of knowledge and academic inquiry.

He repeated Iran's longstanding insistence on its right to develop a nuclear energy program, and its denial of any aspirations to build a nuclear bomb. The issue will once more be the focus of international diplomacy today, as George Bush and Mr Ahmadinejad deliver speeches to the UN at a time of heightened speculation over the possibility of war.

It was during a short period for questions at the end of Mr Ahmadinejad's university appearance yesterday that he was challenged over the persecution of gay people.

"In Iran, we don't have homosexuals. In Iran we don't have this phenomenon. I don't know who has told you we have it," Mr Ahmadinejad said to laughter and cries of disbelief from the audience of students and university staff. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran, and sodomy punishable by death. In one case, two teenage gay boys were executed in 2005. The Iranian authorities accused one of them of rape, but the claim was denounced as a smokescreen for persecution by human rights activists. Mr Ahmadinejad's outlandish claim echoed a policy of denial towards homosexuality by some Iranian clerics and political leaders, but it is likely to have undermined his public relations campaign in the US, aimed at easing pressure on Iran over its nuclear program.

In an earlier teleconference with journalists in Washington, the Iranian president claimed to be unworried about the prospect of a US or Israeli air strike on his country. "Talk of war is basically a propaganda tool. People who talk about it have to bring a legal reason," Mr Ahmadinejad said. "Officials who talk about it should be pressured about what to say and what not to say. They should not endanger world security."

He told journalists any country wanting to go to war against Iran would need a good legal reason to do so and such an excuse did not exist. Iran had not broken any international agreements by developing nuclear power, he said.

He added that the US should have learned the lesson of past mistakes, alluding to the invasion of Iraq and perhaps to the fiasco of the US attempt to rescue the Tehran hostages in 1980.

Asked about US claims at the weekend that Iran is smuggling surface-to-air missiles into Iraq for use against American forces, Mr Ahmadinejad denied it, adding that even if it were true, a few weapons would not make much difference to the US, which was already defeated in Iraq.

Even before yesterday's exchanges, Mr Ahmadinejad faced a hostile reception for his charm offensive. The New York Daily News declared: The Evil has Landed, and the New York Post called him the Madman Iran Prez.