Friday, April 28 2006 10:19 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Vienna (Austria): A top Iranian official handed over information on his country's nuclear programme to the International Atomic Energy Agency in a last-minute move to temper the critical tone of a report to be sent today to the UN Security Council.

Diplomats, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they are not authorised to discuss confidential details of the IAEA's Iran probe, said they had no details of what Iran's deputy nuclear chief, Mohammad Saeedi, had brought to the table yesterday.

Still they characterised the meeting between Saeedi and Olli Heinonen, the IAEA's deputy director general in charge of Iran's nuclear file, as unlikely to blunt the report's main finding that Tehran has ignored council requests to suspend uranium enrichment.

A day before the report's release, deep differences over Iran persisted within the Security Council, where Russia and China are blocking US-led attempts to move from asking Iran to comply to demanding it do so.

The Security Council adopted a statement a month ago that gave Iran until today to suspend all activities linked to enrichment because it can be used to make the highly enriched uranium used in the core of nuclear warheads.

Instead of complying, Iran which says it seeks the technology only to generate power has upped the ante in the past weeks, announcing that it had for the first time successfully enriched uranium and that it was conducting research on advanced centrifuges that would allow it to produce more of the material in less time.