WORLD> Middle East
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Iran's leader says US nuke accusations wrong
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-21 07:34 TEHRAN, Iran: Iran's supreme leader said Sunday that US officials know they are wrongly accusing Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons.
"The US officials who talk about Iranian missiles and their danger while saying Iran intends to build a nuclear bomb, they know these words are wrong," Khamenei said in remarks broadcast on state-run radio. "Despite its apparent friendly messages and words" the Obama administration is pursuing the same policy of Iran-phobia, he said. The US administration has invited Iran to start a dialogue on its nuclear program and gave a vague September deadline for Tehran to take up the offer. The US and five other world powers accepted an offer from Iran earlier this month to hold "comprehensive, all-encompassing and constructive" talks on a range of security issues, including global nuclear disarmament. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana will meet Iran's nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili on Oct. 1 for talks on Iran's nuclear program. Iran has long maintained the program is purely for peaceful purposes and Khamenei reiterated that Iran considers the production and use of nuclear arms forbidden by the country's Muslim beliefs.
US officials have said the decision was based largely on a new US intelligence assessment that Iran's effort to build a nuclear-capable long-range missile would take three years to five years longer than originally thought. The scrapped plan will be replaced by a new one initially geared more to the threat of short- and medium-range missiles from Iran. |