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Iran rejects uranium shipment offer

Medvedev warns of new sanctions

AFP, Tehran! Moscow
Iran has decided to turn down proposals from the major powers for the supply of nuclear fuel, a leading member of parliament said yesterday, in a serious setback for UN-brokered efforts to allay Western concerns about its atomic ambitions.
Under the plan thrashed out in talks with France, Russia and the United States, Iran was to have shipped out most of its stocks of low-enriched uranium in return for fuel for a research reactor inTehran.
The proposals were designed to assuage fears that Iran could otherwise divert some of the stocks and enrich them further to the much higher levels of purity required to make an atomic bomb.
But officials, who strongly deny any such
intention, had expressed mounting concern that Iran's arch-foe Washington might welch on the deal and Tehran might ship out its uranium without receiving anything in return.
"We do not want to give part of our 1,200 kilos (more than 2,640 pounds) of enriched uranium in order to receive fuel of 20 percent enrichment," said Alacddin Borujerdi, the influential head of parliament's national security and foreign policy committee.
"This option of giving our enriched uranium gradually or in one go is over now," he told the 1SNA news agency.
"We are studying how to procure fuel and (Ali Asghar) Soltanieh is negotiating to And a solution," he added, referring to Iran's envoy to the UN nuclear watchdog.
A spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Saturday that it was "still waiting for the formal response'r from Soltanieh.
But a second member of the Iranian parliamentary committee also said that response would be negative.
"We were not against the exchange," the ISNA news agency quoted Hossein Naghavi Hosseini as saying.
‘'But during the negotiation, they were unable to give Iran the confidence and so the response of the Islamic Republic of Iran is negative."
Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki had said on Friday that Iran was considering alternatives to the exchange deal -- either further enriching the uranium on its own for the Tehran reactor or importing the fuel commer-cially.
But Russia, which would have further processed the Iranian uranium under the UN-brokered deal, warned Tehran it risked further sanctions if it took a "less constructive position."
"If the Iranian leadership takes a less constructive position, then in theory anything is possible," Medvedev said in the interview, a full transcript of which was released by the Kremlin.
"I do not want that all this ends up with the adopting of international sanctions because sanctions, as a rule, lead in a complex and dangerous direction," Medvedev added.
"But if there is no movement forward then no-one is going to exclude such a scenario, he said in the comments to German weekly Der Spiegel.
In its initial reply to the IAEA-drafted plan handed over on October 29, Tehran took issue with provisions for it to ship out 75 percent of its stocks before receiving any fuel, Iranian media reported.
A number of senior officials had argued that that stipulation would be a major concession for Iran for wnich it would receive little in return.
"What guarantee do we have that if we deliver our enriched uranium, we will get the fuel?" hardline cleric Ahmad Khatami said on Friday, giving vent to the misgivings of many in the regime.
In an interview with the New York Times on Thursday, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei acknowledged Iranian suspicions.
"There's total distrust on the part of Iran," he said.