Iran vows to follow nuclear path despite sanctions

By Zahra Hosseinian

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iranian leaders vowed on Wednesday to press on with Tehran's disputed nuclear work regardless of any new U.N. sanctions, one day after world powers agreed the outline of a new resolution.

"The Iranian nation has chosen its path and will continue with it," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA.

"Such illegal behavior (by Western powers) ... will not divert the Iranian nation from its path."

The United States and other Western powers fear Iran's nuclear activities are aimed at building nuclear weapons. Iran, the world's fourth-largest crude oil exporter, says its nuclear program is intended to generate electricity.

World powers agreed on Tuesday on the outline of a third sanctions resolution against Iran, but diplomats said the draft did not contain the punitive economic measures Washington had been pushing for.

The West has faced a diplomatic showdown with Iran since 2002 and the U.N. Security Council has already imposed two sets of sanctions, in December 2006 and March 2007.

Washington has spearheaded a drive for new sanctions and had been pushing for a new resolution to impose a ban on business with leading Iranian state banks.

But that drive appears to have failed. Russia and China, both commercial partners of Iran, have hardened their opposition to tough sanctions since a U.S. intelligence report last month said Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

"NOT TOUGH"

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in Berlin on Tuesday after a nearly two-hour meeting with his counterparts from Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, that the new draft of a sanctions resolution would be presented to the U.N. Security Council in the coming weeks.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said it was not tough or punitive and "welcomes the progress made between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ..."

"The measures in this draft do not have a tough sanctioning character," Lavrov said on Wednesday.

He said the new draft would "call on countries to be alert in their transport relations with Iran so that those relations are not used to transport (potentially dangerous) materials".

His remarks suggested the United States failed to win agreement in Berlin on punitive economic sanctions against Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sounded a conciliatory note after weeks of anti-Iranian rhetoric by the Bush administration and repeated her offer to develop normal ties with Tehran if it gave up sensitive nuclear work.