Iran rejected a plan to send its uranium to be processed overseas hours after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country was ready to cooperate with the West.
European diplomats and American officials were quoted by the New York Times on Thursday night as saying that Teheran had informed the UN of its decision, but had not provided a reason for backing out of the draft agreement formulated during a conference in Vienna last week. However, the sources said that the Iranians had objected to the most prominent section of the plan which called for a large quantity of its uranium stockpile to be transferred to Russia, where it would be prepared before returning to the Islamic republic.
The plan works under the assumption that the amount to be shipped - three quarters of its total stock - would leave Teheran with insufficient uranium to produce a nuclear weapon.
A senior European official quoted by the Times called the Iranian response "basically a refusal."
Meanwhile, the paper was told by a US National Security Council Spokesman Michael Hammer that the decision had yet to be made formal by the Iranian government.
In Washington, a key Senate committee passed sanctions legislation meant to cripple Teheran's ability to import gasoline, a day after a House committee did the same.
The legislation still needs to pass a full session of both houses of the legislature before it can become law.
Ahmadinejad, in a speech to a rally on Thursday in the northeastern city of Mashhad, called enriching uranium Iran's "inalienable right" and said the West had moved from "confrontation to interaction."
Ahmadinejad said that "ground has been paved for nuclear cooperation" and Teheran was ready to work on nuclear fuel supplies and technical know-how with the UN nuclear watchdog, but then hedged on whether Iran would fulfill the agreement as it had been worked out.
He said Iran welcomed the international offer to ship out 70 percent of its enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment, but was vague as to whether the Islamic Republic would sign the deal.
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Iran has made an A_S of you
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