Iran Willing to Abandon Uranium Enrichment, Envoy Suggests

Iran would consider suspending uranium enrichment if the country were guaranteed a supply of nuclear fuel for its power stations, a senior Iranian diplomat said yesterday.

Western officials responded cautiously to the remarks, pointing out that Iran had already been offered a legally binding fuel supply in a multinational proposal put forward in 2006, and renewed in June.

However, the officials said the comments by Ali Asghar Soltanieh marked a break from Tehran's customary insistence that it would not negotiate its right to enrich uranium.

There have been three UN security council resolutions to impose sanctions for Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment. Iran says it is enriching uranium to use in power stations, but western nations say this is a cover for building weapons.

Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was speaking to journalists after a meeting organized by the European Policy Center thinktank in Brussels, where he suggested Iran's uranium enrichment might be a matter for negotiation. "We are going to continue as long as there is no legally binding internationally recognized instrument for assurance of supply," Soltanieh said. If IAEA members guaranteed that supply, "Iran would be able to reconsider the position".

But Soltanieh suggested Iran might want to retain the capacity to enrich some uranium as a "contingency in case of interruption" in supply.

A negotiating group representing the US, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany offered Iran help in building a nuclear power industry, including a guaranteed fuel supply, in 2006, on condition Tehran halted enrichment. A team led by the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, presented a slightly modified version of the offer in Tehran in June.

Iranian engineers have installed more than 3,000 centrifuges at an enrichment plant in Natanz, which have produced an estimated 500kg of low-enriched uranium. Western experts believe it would take only a matter of months to use the centrifuges to highly enrich enough of this to make a bomb.

One British diplomat said: "Is this an interesting show of ankle? It's too early to tell. All is as clear as mud."