SHANGHAI, June 16 (RIA Novosti) - Iran's president said Friday that proposals put forward by six nations in a bid to solve the crisis around the country's nuclear program were a step forward.
EU foreign policy supremo Javier Solana handed proposals drafted by five permanent UN Security Council members and Germany to Tehran during a visit June 6. The Iran-6 drew up the package of incentives in bid to make it suspend uranium enrichment, which they fear could be used for weapons production.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told journalists in Shanghai following a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that Iran would give its answer to the proposals in due course, and that the Islamic Republic was not afraid of a possible attack by Israel on its nuclear facilities, which Russian experts say are deep underground.
Iran is not trying to create nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad said, and would prefer dialog over its nuclear program rather than increased tension. He also said that economic sanctions should be abandoned from international practices.
Ahmadinejad said Iran holds similar opinions on many global problems to Russia and China, two permanent Security Council members and main players in the SCO, a regional security and economic forum, in which Iran currently holds observer status. The Islamic Republic has said it is aiming for full membership of the organization.
Russia and China, which have major business interests in Iran, have opposed sanctions against the country that the U.S., Britain and France proposed in the UN Security Council. Russia has said the Iran nuclear crisis should be resolve by dialog and through the offices of the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Speaking at the summit Thursday, Ahmadinejad proposed that Russia, China, and other SCO member states - former Soviet Central Asian republics Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan - holding an energy forum in Tehran to discuss join prospecting and production of oil and natural gas in Iran, the world's fourth largest oil producer and a major gas producer.
He also suggested that Iran and Russia should jointly fix global gas prices.
