Iran denies minister made statement on enrichment

TEHRAN, June 22 (Reuters) Iran denied today that Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi said Iran has 100 kg of enriched uranium material in storage, the official IRNA news agency said.

Another Iranian news agency, ISNA, had earlier said Pourmohammadi made the remarks in a speech in south-western Iran late yesterday.

The comments might have worried Western powers fearing Tehran is seeking to develop nuclear bombs.

But the public relations office of the Interior Ministry said in a statement carried by IRNA: ''(Pourmohammadi) did not say anything about the amount of enriched uranium (or) the numbers of installed centrifuges ... Therefore, recent reports citing him are denied.'' Iran's chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani was due to hold a new round of exploratory talks with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana in the Portuguese capital Lisbon tomorrow.

Iran has repeatedly refused UN demands to halt uranium enrichment, a process to make fuel for nuclear power plants that can also provide material for weapons if enriched to a much higher degree. Tehran says its purposes are entirely peaceful.

Diplomats and nuclear analysts say roughly 500 kg of low-enriched uranium would be needed as material for one bomb but it would have to be re-introduced into centrifuge machines reconfigured to produce bomb-grade uranium.

They say this would be difficult to hide from UN inspectors and Iran has repeatedly said it has no intention of trying to produce highly-enriched uranium suitable for weapons.

The last meeting between Larijani and Solana, in Madrid last month, did not yield any breakthrough on the dispute. Instead of halting enrichment, as the UN Security Council has demanded, Iran has rapidly expanded its programme.

The UN Security Council has imposed two rounds of limited sanctions on Iran over its refusal to halt such work.

The United States said on Tuesday it and five other world powers -- Britain, Russia, France, Germany and China -- had begun discussing a third round of UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear defiance.

Iran, OPEC's second-largest crude exporter, says it solely aims to generate electricity so that it can export more of its valuable oil and gas.

REUTERS GL RN2140