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Tehran says incentives would not change nuclear course

Iran Materials 13 April 2008 11:46 (UTC +04:00)

(dpa) - Financial incentives would not change the course of Iran's nuclear course, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini said Sunday.

While addressing the five UN veto powers plus Germany, scheduled to meet on Wednesday in Shanghai, the spokesman said also the policy of sanctions proved in the past to be futile and would not work in the future, either.

In a press briefing in Tehran, Hosseini called on the six countries to acknowledge the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear projects and revise their previous policies.

He added that Iran would not retreat from its nuclear rights and even incentives would not change this principle.

The United Nations Security Council has already issued three resolutions against Iran, including sanctions, for having refused to suspend its nuclear programmes, particularly the uranium enrichment process.

Iran has not only ignored the UN resolutions, but has even installed a further 6,000 centrifuges and made operational three further cascades of 164 centrifuges each.

Iran's Vice President and head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, Gholamreza Aghazadeh is to meet Monday in Vienna with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Mohamed ElBaradei to discuss both the newly-installed centrifuges and future programmes, including the use of higher speed centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

The centrifuges used in Iran are still of type P1 and not the advanced and faster P2 type but President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said earlier this week that "new devices" would be tested and ready within three months.

He claimed that the new devices would be "five times" as fast as the previous ones but gave no details.

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