Iran offers co-operation on Israel-Hizbollah truce

Iran's Foreign Minister offered UN Secretary General Kofi Annan his country's full co-operation over a Security Council resolution on the truce between Israel and Hizbollah, a UN spokesman said yesterday.

Iran is widely believed to be the main arms supplier for Hizbollah in Lebanon. Although Iran funded and armed Hizbollah in the 1980s, it now says its support is primarily moral and political.

Annan met the Iranian minister to seek help in shoring up the Hizbollah-Israel ceasefire and also discussed Tehran's nuclear standoff with the West.

Fawzi said Annan had also held a telephone conversation with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prior to the Iran visit.

The UN resolution called for a truce and a UN peacekeeping force to help the Lebanese army supervise the pull-out of Israeli troops after 34 days of fighting between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas.

Fawzi said the discussed paragraph 15 of the resolution, referring to a ban on illegal arms shipments to Lebanon, but gave no details.

Annan arrived in the Iranian capital two days after the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), reported that Tehran had failed to meet the UN Security Council's August 31 deadline to halt uranium enrichment.

Some analysts say Iran may have been emboldened in its nuclear standoff by the Lebanon conflict, which Tehran declared a victory for its ally Hizbollah.

Iran insists its atomic plans are directed at generating electricity but the West says it wants to build nuclear bombs. The European Union agreed yesterday to try to clarify Iran's stance on halting uranium enrichment within two weeks and UN Secretary-General. Annan held talks in Tehran to try and settle the standoff.

The United States, which accuses Iran of seeking atomic bombs, said on Friday it was consulting European governments about possible sanctions against the Islamic Republic, but the EU signalled it wanted to see more dialogue with Tehran which says its atomic activity is aimed at producing power. EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana will meet Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, next week to try to clear up ambiguities in Tehran's reply to the major powers' offer of broad co-operation if it stops the nuclear work.

Slovenian Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel said after the 25 EU ministers discussed the Iranian issue in Finland yesterday: "We give Solana two weeks for his clarification talks."

But Solana told reporters: "There's no deadline, whenever we finish... We are going to start in the coming days and I hope that it will be very short. We don't need many meetings."

Other EU ministers said Solana would report back to them in Brussels on September 15 and they had agreed not to take any action against Iran before then.