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Iran: Islamic republic’s head fails to back nuclear agreement

IRAN’S Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declared yesterday that he was “neither for nor against” a nuclear agreement put together last week by international negotiators in Switzerland.

And the country’s President Hassan Rouhani said that Iran wouldn’t sign any accord over the country’s nuclear energy programme unless all sanctions linked to it were lifted immediately.

“We will not sign any agreement unless all economic sanctions are totally lifted on the first day of the implementation of the deal,” Rouhani said at a ceremony to mark Iran’s nuclear technology day.

Iran and the P5+1 group — the five permanent United Nations security council members plus Germany — sketched out a deal which would limit Iran’s access to technology that could in theory be used to make an atomic bomb in exchange for allowing it access to bank accounts, oil markets and financial assets that have been blocked by international sanctions.

But the text says that punitive sanctions will only be lifted once experts say Iran is sticking to the terms of the agreement.

The statements by Mr Khameni and Mr Rouhani could be part of their negotiating tactics as further talks approach.

The nuclear agreement is expected to be signed by June 30.

Iran insists that its nuclear programme is only for peaceful purposes — energy production, medicine and science.

Late on Wednesday, the country’s deputy UN ambassador Gholam Hossein Dehghani criticised the world’s five major nuclear powers — Britain, China, the US, Russia and France — for promising nuclear disarmament but doing little to achieve it.

In a speech to the UN disarmament commission, he called for a “comprehensive, binding, irreversible, verifiable” treaty to rid to world of the weapons of mass destruction.

Chinese counsellor Sun Lei urged countries to “abandon the cold-war mentality” and said those with the largest nuclear arsenals should be the first to make “drastic and substantive” cuts.

by Our Foreign Desk

And Russian counsellor Olga Kuznetsova warned of the destabilising nature of anti-missile systems, which she said strengthens the security of some states at the expense of others.

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