DAR AL ISLAM - IRAN: IRAN IS READY TO OFFER "NUKE GURANTEE"

'Iran ready to offer nuke guarantee'

Tehran shrugs off threat of more UN sanctionsAfp, TehranIranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki yesterday said Iran was prepared to offer "necessary" guarantees on its nuclear programme if the issue is withdrawn from the UN Security Council.

Mottaki said in a speech to the international Conference on Disarmament here that Iran was prepared to make efforts to build confidence if the Security Council's five permanent members plus Germany returned the issue to International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"Let me seize this opportunity, and in order to show our readiness to resolve the issue, underline that if the five plus one countries refer back Iran's nuclear issues from the Security Council to the IAEA, my country will be prepared to offer necessary guarantees in order to create confidence regarding non-diversion of its nuclear programme," he said.

He did not specify what guarantees Iran was prepared to give.

Iran yesterday shrugged off the threat of further UN sanctions over its nuclear programme, saying more punitive action would hurt neither the controversial atomic drive nor the country's economy.

"The adoption of another resolution is unwelcome but is not worrying," government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters. "It will not affect our work and will not concern our people."

Elham reaffirmed the government's oft-repeated insistence that Tehran has no intention of suspending sensitive uranium enrichment activities, the key demand of the UN Security Council over its atomic programme.

"The issue of suspension is completely ruled out and cannot be brought up. They (the other side) have themselves given up on this," he said.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, angrily brushed off warnings from within Iran that a second Security Council resolution against Tehran would put the country in an increasingly risky situation.

"Those who say that this country is in a critical situation just think they are politicians," Ahmadinejad told the government daily Iran in a typically combative interview.

"Which part of our country is in a critical condition?" he asked in the interview, the full text of which will be published on Thursday.

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