A team from the UN nuclear watchdog led by its second-in-command held talks in Teheran yesterday seeking details about Iran's offer to answer unresolved questions about its disputed nuclear program.

Iran has offered to draw up an "action plan" to address suspicions that its nuclear program has military goals. Teheran insists its aims are purely civilian but faces the prospect of more UN sanctions for failing to convince world powers.

Shortly after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team arrived, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the Islamic Republic would not halt its nuclear work, once again snubbing UN calls for Teheran to suspend uranium enrichment activity.

"The process of the installment (of centrifuges) might slow down or speed up... but no one should expect us to give up our rights and stop its process," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.

IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei has said the transparency offer, combined with what the IAEA has said was a slowdown in Iran's uranium enrichment work, had raised hopes of defusing the row.

IAEA Deputy Director Olli Heinonen and other agency officials began talks in Iran's capital with an Iranian team led by Javad Vaeedi, the deputy to Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, IRNA reported.

Heinonen was expected to "negotiate with Iranian nuclear officials about designing a framework for ways to solve the remaining issues in Iran's nuclear case", IRNA reported. Results were expected to be announced this evening, it added.

The United States and its European Union allies wonder whether Iran's offer of transparency is anything more than an exercise to buy time and avert further UN measures.

The IAEA wants explanations for traces of highly enriched uranium found on some equipment. It also wants to know more about experiments with plutonium, the status of research into an advanced centrifuge able to enrich uranium three times as fast as the model Iran now uses, and documents showing how to cast uranium metal for a bomb core.

(China Daily via agencies July 12, 2007)