Iran refuses to budge on nuclear rights

Tehran: Iran will not retreat "one iota" from its nuclear rights, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday, the day of an informal deadline set by Western officials in a row over Tehran's atomic ambitions.

Ahmadinejad made the remark in a statement posted on the presidential website after talks in Tehran with Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.

"In whichever negotiation we take part ... it is unequivocally with the view to the realisation of Iran's nuclear right, and the Iranian nation would not retreat one iota from its rights," Ahmadinejad's statement said.

The presidency website quoted Assad, on his third trip to Tehran since Ahmadinejad gained power in 2005, as saying that "Syria strongly stands by Iran and will not change its stance."

It quoted Bashar as saying: "We have told the Europeans that Syria believes that any country including Iran, and based on international treaties, has the right to enrich uranium and have a nuclear power plant."

The Syrian leader's visit follows a trip to Paris a month ago during which French President Nicolas Sarkozy urged Syria to "persuade Iran" to prove that it is not seeking nuclear weapons.

Local media reported that Bashar would also meet Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the last word on major issues, before returning to Damascus on Sunday.

Bashar's visit coincides with this weekend's US deadline for Iran to respond to an international package of incentives for it to freeze its drive to enrich uranium amid warnings of new sanctions if it does not.

Iran dismisses the idea of having a deadline to reply and accuses the West of double standards.

"There is nothing new (from Iran)," the EU official said, adding that the bloc did not expect an answer over the weekend.

"One should not focus on the deadline too much ... what matters is that we get a clear answer quickly, it's not a matter of one day," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the nuclear talk.

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino warned: "Negative consequences await if they don't have a positive

response to our very generous incentives package, and that would possibly come in the form of sanctions."

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave Iran two weeks to come up with a "serious" reply after an international meeting in Geneva on July 19 which saw Tehran broadly accused of stonewalling.

Perino said the United States would coordinate any action with its partners in the P5-plus-1, or the permanent UN Security Council members - the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France - plus Germany.

The P5-plus-1 has offered Iran benefits in civil nuclear energy, trade, finance, agriculture and high technology if it freezes uranium enrichment.

If Iran accepts the package, there would be pre-negotiations during which Tehran would add no more uranium-enriching centrifuges and, in return, face no further sanctions.

Iran's representative to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said the country is open to talks but does not consider it is bound by any deadline to answer to the major powers' offer.

"We have not had any discussion (or) agreement of the so-called timeline of two weeks," he told Iran's state Press TV satellite station in comments broadcast on Saturday.

But German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Iran should to stop playing for time.

"Enough dallying about," he told Der Spiegel magazine, adding that Tehran should respond to the Western powers with a useful answer or else face tougher sanctions.

Oil prices rose on Friday after Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz warned Iran was on the verge of a breakthrough in its nuclear programme.

The United Nations has imposed three rounds of sanctions on Iran.

The freeze-for-freeze offer is aimed at getting preliminary talks started. Formal negotiations on the nuclear, trade and other incentives will not start before Iran suspends uranium enrichment, something it has shown no sign of doing.

Solana and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili could talk by telephone in the next few days, an EU diplomat said on Friday.

Diplomats say new UN sanctions on Iran are unlikely before September and may not happen this year, though Western states may take tougher measures of their own. Russia, one of the six powers facing Iran, has also opposed a deadline.