Iran will push nuclear programme 'to the limit'

TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Friday said Iran will continue developing its nuclear programme to the limit as threats loom of yet more UN sanctions against the country.

"Iran's nuclear technology is being developed each day and will reach the farthest possible limit," the president said in a speech in Isfahan province reported by state news agency IRNA.

"The great powers are using every means to prevent Iran's progress, but the Iranian people, with strength and resistance, will brush aside the obstacles placed along the way by those powers and will continue their path to the summit of progress."

He was speaking as the United States was urging its European allies, Russia, and China to toughen sanctions on Iran for its defiance of UN demands to rein in its suspect nuclear programme.

"We need to strengthen our sanction regime," President George W Bush yesterday said a day after UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency said Tehran had accelerated its uranium enrichment efforts, which can be a key step in atomic bomb-making.

Ahmadinejad said in response that the "great powers should renounce their crude methods against Iran, such as adopting sanctions, and should apologise to the people of Iran."

He repeated his oft-stated insistence that Tehran will not budge one iota from its efforts to develop nuclear power, something it claims the right to do under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it signed.