Arab leaders of the Persian Gulf appealed on Tuesday to their neighbour Iran to "respond positively" to talks with world powers on the Islamic republic's contentious nuclear programme, AFP reported.
(Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) leaders at the end of a two-day summit also called for the "drying up" of funding for terrorism, after US diplomatic cables on WikiLeaks pointed fingers over funding in the oil-rich region for Islamists, Tabnak reported.
GCC states "welcome international efforts, including those made by the P5+1, to peacefully resolve Iran's nuclear crisis and hope it will respond positively to these efforts," read the final statement of the Abu Dhabi summit.
They stressed the "right of all countries in the region to develop civilian nuclear energy within the standards and under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency".
They also said these standards had to be applied to all countries in the Middle East, including Israel, the region's sole if undeclared nuclear weapons-possessing state.
Bahrain and Saudi Arabia signed cooperation accords on civil nuclear technology with the United States in 2008, while other Gulf states including Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates have similar deals with atomic powers.
The six-nation GCC, which also groups Oman and Qatar, urged Iran to be a "good neighbour".
It insisted on "commitment to the international legitimacy principles, peacefully resolving conflicts and making the Middle East including the Gulf region free of mass destruction and nuclear weapons".
Iran on Tuesday wrapped up two days of talks in Geneva with the P5+1 grouping of UN Security Council permanent members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany.
"It's a good step," Emirates Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah Ben Zayed Al Nahayan said of the talks.
"If there are issues which are creating any kind of mistrust between Iran and the 5+1..., they have to be resolved quickly, in a professional manner and in a very transparent away."
The summit came on the heels of the release of US diplomatic cables by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks that reported calls from some GCC member states for Washington to take military action against Tehran to prevent it acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, an ambition Iran strongly denies.
The Arab states of the Gulf, fearing Shiite Iran's growing influence in the region, have not concealed their anger at being excluded from talks on Iran's nuclear programme.
The GCC statement also "stressed the importance of working towards drying up sources of funding for terrorist groups" and urged the prevention of "media from publishing anything that would encourage these criminal acts".
The leaked US diplomatic cables showed Saudi Arabia is the key source of funding for radical Islamist groups including Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hamas.
Other cables branded Qatar and Kuwait as notably lax in pursuing locals who donate to the groups, and raised concerns about "suspected Taliban-related financial activities" in the UAE.
GCC chief Abdulrahman Al Attiyah said the documents released by WikiLeaks had created "misunderstandings" and "cannot be taken seriously".
"These links... created a kind of misunderstanding about the information," he said, adding "these kind of sites cannot be reliable or credible sources".
The GCC threw its support behind the Palestinians' refusal to negotiate with Israel without a settlement moratorium, stressing any construction freeze should include East Jerusalem as well as the West Bank.
On Iraq, it said restoration of security and stability required "the completion of total national reconciliation".
King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who is hospitalised in the United States for back trouble, did not attend the summit at which the Saudi delegation was headed by Interior Minister Prince Nayef Ben Abdul Aziz.
Saudi Arabia is to host the next end-of-year GCC summit in December 2011.
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