Iran to halt spot atomic checks if reported to UN - Yahoo! News

Iran to halt spot atomic checks if reported to UN - Yahoo! News

"If these countries use all their means ... to put pressure on Iran, Iran will use its capacity in the region," the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Larijani as saying.

It was not clear what regional capacities he meant. Analysts and diplomats say Iran, with its links to Islamist parties and militants, has the means to create trouble for the West in
Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and elsewhere.

Iran was responding to an agreement ... among the Security Council's big five, plus Germany and the
European Union, ... that the U.N. nuclear watchdog should report to the council this week on what Tehran must do to cooperate with the agency.

"We consider any referral or report of Iran to the Security Council as the end of diplomacy," Larijani, who is secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told state television.

Iran's Oil Minister Kazem Vaziri eased concerns that the world's fourth biggest crude oil producer could curb oil exports in reprisal, as Tehran has previously hinted it may do.

"We are not mixing oil with politics," he told reporters at the start of an
OPEC meeting in Vienna.