Khamenei also hailed the Iranian people and the conservative-controlled parliament in his remarks, which came just days after the UN atomic watchdog issued a key report on Iran's controversial atomic drive.

"One of the examples of achievements in last 29 years (since the Islamic revolution) is the nuclear issue," Khamenei told Iran's elite clerical body the Assembly of Experts, in comments broadcast on state television.

"Here the Iranian nation has rightfully and justly reached a great success and a remarkable achievement."

According to the state radio announcer, Khamenei also said: "The personal role of the president and his resistance in the nuclear case is very clear."

His comments came as Western powers stepped up efforts to impose a third set of UN Security Council sanctions over Iran's nuclear programme to punish its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, a potential weapons-making process.

Representatives from six world powers met in Washington on Monday on a draft resolution imposing new sanctions proposed by permanent Security Council members Britain and France, after a new report by the UN atomic watchdog.

As well as praising the hardline Ahmadinejad, Khamenei also took a swipe at reformists who dominated the previous Iranian parliament (2000-2004) and had suggested making concessions in the nuclear standoff.

"Alongside the resistance of the people, the seventh parliament (sitting from 2004-2008), unlike some in the previous period, really stood and insisted" on the nuclear issue, he said.

"I do not know how to thank people who have stood up all over the country over the nuclear issue," Khamenei added.

Ahmadinejad has sometimes been criticised in Iran for his confrontational nuclear stance, but the comments by Khamenei indicate he has the backing in the atomic crisis of the Islamic republic's undisputed number one.

Khamenei made no specific reaction to the report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said it was still not in a position to determine the "full nature of Iran's nuclear programme".

The report also confirmed that Tehran was continuing to defy Security Council demands by enriching uranium and had started experimenting with a new generation of more efficient uranium-enriching centrifuges.

World powers fear Iran could use uranium enrichment to make nuclear weapons but OPEC's number two oil exporter insists its nuclear programme is peaceful and aimed only at generating atomic energy.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told foreign ambassadors in Tehran on Tuesday that Iran had no alternative but to find a new source of energy to meet domestic demand as its fossil fuel reserves would eventually be depleted,

"Since a number of countries such as the United States are opposed to our scientific and technical progress, they try to throw obstacles on our path," he complained.

Diplomats at IAEA headquarters in Vienna said documents presented to the nuclear watchdog's governors on Monday suggested Iran continued nuclear weapons work beyond the 2003 date cited in a December US intelligence report.

The December report had said Tehran had been working on the development of nuclear weapons but abandoned the programme in 2003, contradicting Western claims that Iran had an active atomic arms programme.

"Certainly some of the dates that we were talking about, or that the secretariat was presenting in there, went beyond 2003," said Britain's ambassador to the IAEA, Simon Smith.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh dismissed the documents and slides shown to the meeting as amateurish and the intelligence as "lousy", saying it could easily have been drawn up "by any undergraduate."

Community
Email This Article
Comment On This Article

Related Links
Learn about nuclear weapons doctrine and defense at SpaceWar.com
Learn about missile defense at SpaceWar.com
All about missiles at SpaceWar.com
Learn about the Superpowers of the 21st Century at SpaceWar.com