Tuesday, May 23 2006 17:53 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Beijing: China today (May 23, 2006) acknowledged assisting Iran's pursuit of "peaceful" nuclear energy needs under IAEA safeguards but rejected Western criticism of aiding Tehran's alleged atomic weapons programme.

"Some countries have been conducting cooperation with Iran in the peaceful use of nuclear technology. China is one of them," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters here at a bi-weekly briefing.

"We have reported our cooperation with Iran to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and our cooperation conforms to the positions set out in the NPT and it is also subject to the safeguards of IAEA," he said.

"We cannot accept these kinds of accusations against China," Liu said while reacting to Western media reports alleging that Iran is most likely to have used hexafluoride gas it had purchased from China in 1991 as material for enriching uranium.

He said the principled position of China is to oppose proliferation of nuclear weapons and not to export sensitive equipment and technologies related to uranium enrichment and processing.

"Since 1992, China has been a party to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and we have been honouring our commitments," Liu claimed.

Last month, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran has joined the ranks of countries with nuclear technology, in the wake of a series of successful experiments in which Iranian scientists had taken uranium hexafluoride gas, introduce it into a small number of centrifuges, and produced a small quantity of low enriched uranium.