Ahmadinejad warns against new UN sanctions

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that it was "too late" to stop Iran's nuclear programme and warned the US and its allies not to push for new UN sanctions.

"We advise them not to play with the lion's tail," Ahmadinejad said, drawing applause from a room of reporters, Iranian officials and foreign dignitaries at a Tehran news conference.

"It is too late to stop the progress of Iran," Ahmadinejad said. "Iran has passed the point where they wanted Iran to stop."

The UN Security Council is preparing to debate a third set of sanctions against the Islamic republic in response to Tehran's continuing refusal to suspend uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for civilian energy or fissile material for a bomb.

Addressing the West, Ahmadinejad said that a third round of sanctions will only "make things harder for you and distances you from resolving the issue … We advise them to give up stubbornness and childish games."

Asked about Ahmadinejad's comment that it was too late to halt Iran's nuclear push, US state department spokesman Sean McCormack said: "It isn't."

"He could make the decision today to take up the reasonable offer to negotiate with the rest of the world so that Iran can make peaceful nuclear energy and not have a cloud hanging over the country," McCormack said.

"The international system is not going to be intimidated by these kinds of threats and this bluff and bluster by the Iranian government."

But shortly after Ahmadinejad's press conference, Iran issued its harshest refutation yet of American demands to release dual citizens held in Iran on espionage charges.

Iran's foreign ministry said American abuses - from prisoner mistreatment at Guantanamo to a UCLA police officer's shocking an Iranian-American student with a Taser - showed Washington had no right to criticise Iran's human rights record.

"Instead of offering inefficient suggestions, America should assess its own tactics - secret prisons, mistreatment and even inhuman treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib," foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini said in a statement.

Iran has detained Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East programme at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Centre for Scholars; Kian Tajbakhsh with George Soros' Open Society Institute; journalist Parnaz Azima from the US-funded Radio Farda; and Ali Shakeri, a peace activist and founding board member at the University of California Centre for Citizen Peacebuilding.

The Iranian statement referred to three Iranian-Americans charged with espionage and endangering national security, without providing names.

Ahmadinejad touched briefly on the issue at his press conference, saying Iran's judiciary would rule independently on the dual citizens' cases, then returned to international issues including Iraq, fighting in Lebanon and Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The Security Council first imposed sanctions on Iran in December and modestly increased them in March over Iran's refusal to suspend enrichment. Iran says it is within its rights to pursue uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes.

The country's nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, said this week that the nuclear stand-off could be settled in the coming weeks if the council drops preparations to debate the third round of sanctions.

Larijani met Germany's foreign minister ahead of the G8 summit, which opens tomorrow in Germany.

The nuclear showdown is expected to feature prominently at the summit attended by leaders of the Security Council's five permanent members and Germany, which have led efforts to address concerns over Iran's nuclear ambitions, will be at the meeting.

Ahmadinejad's news conference was his first since talks between US and Iranian diplomats in Baghdad on May 28 - the first public talks between the two countries in nearly three decades. The two sides are supposed to meet again in less than a month.

The president scoffed at US accusations that Iranian agents were helping fellow Shiite militants in Iraq but said that Tehran wanted to help calm the violence there.

"The occupiers of Iraq ... have lost the way, they don't know what to do. They imagine that by accusing others, they can resolve problems."

"Now, they said help us," Ahmadinejad said, in an apparent reference to the US invitation for the Baghdad talks. "We are prepared, for the sake of the Iraqi people, to help. We won't spare any efforts."

Iranians have largely welcomed the talks, although state television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying Iran only agreed to them after the US asked Iran 40 times and sent a formal diplomatic note.