Ahmadinejad's defiant stand on eve of nuclear deadline

Friday, 28 April 2006

By Simon Freeman, Times Online BOI - With less than 24 hours before the latest deadline to halt its uranium enrichment expires, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today made another belligerent pledge to press ahead with his nation's outlawed nuclear programme. At a rally in the north of the Islamic republic, the President told crowds: "We have obtained the technology for producing nuclear fuel. Thanks to God we are a nuclear state, no one can take that away from our nation." The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) said that the republic was testing a more sophisticated type of centrifuge, the P-2, which can purify uranium more quickly into forms suitable for energy or weaponry. Mohammad Mohaddessin, chairman of the NCRI’s foreign affairs committee, said at a news conference in Paris: "The clerical regime will never abandon nuclear weapons because it considers them to be a strategic guarantee for survival." Mr Mohaddessin claimed that North Korean and Chinese experts had travelled to Iran to check machinery at a research site in Ab-e Ali, north of Tehran. The NCRI's information led to the discovery of two decades of covert atomic activity in Iran two years ago. more