TEHRAN, 5 August 2003 — Iran said yesterday it would not hand over any detained members of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network to Washington and denied trying to strike a prisoner exchange deal with the United States. Iran publicly acknowledged for the first time last month that it was holding some senior Al-Qaeda figures and said it planned to extradite some of them to “friendly countries”.

On Saturday, the New York Times quoted a US official as saying Washington had approached Tehran with a request to hand over Al-Qaeda men in Iranian custody, including Saif Al-Adel, an Egyptian thought to be Al-Qaeda’s security chief.

The paper said Iran wanted the United States to hand over members of the People’s Mujahedeen Iranian opposition group, currently under US control in Iraq, in return. But Iran’s government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh told a news conference yesterday Tehran was not interested in such a deal.

“Iran has never asked for such a swap. We never make deals or act selectively regarding terrorism,” he said. He said Al-Qaeda members could only be handed over to countries with which Iran had extradition agreements. “Since last year, identified (Al-Qaeda) suspects have been extradited to friendly countries with which we have an agreement for extraditing criminals,” Ramazanzadeh said. “But we do not have such an agreement with America.”

Ramazanzadeh declined to reveal the identity of the Al-Qaeda members in Iran’s custody for “security reasons”. He said that arrested members of Al-Qaeda who had committed crimes in Iran would be prosecuted by Iranian courts.

Ramazanzadeh also said supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will have the final say on whether Tehran agrees to tougher UN inspections of its nuclear facilities. International pressure has been mounting on Iran to sign an Additional Protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which would allow more intrusive, short-notice inspections of nuclear sites in the country.

Meanwhile, International Atomic Energy Agency experts started crucial talks here yesterday on whether or not Tehran will accept snap inspections of its nuclear sites, Iran’s state news agency IRNA announced. Three legal experts of the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, were holding talks with Iranian counterparts, said the spokesman of Iran’s nuclear energy organization, Saber Zaimian, quoted by IRNA.

Iran will decide in line with its “national interests” whether to accept snap inspections and submit its choice to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for final approval, a government spokesman said earlier the same day.

The Islamic republic is under strong international pressure to prove it is not secretly developing atomic weapons by signing an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The IAEA experts will explain the implications of Tehran signing the protocol, which would allow UN inspectors to descend without warning on suspect sites undeclared by Iran.

“After these people come to Iran and we listen to their reasons and justifications, then we will decide whether to sign the IAEA’s additional protocol,” Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said last week.

The Iranian government asked the IAEA experts to visit Tehran before taking a final decision on whether or not to comply. Iran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful, and says that Western countries are bound by the NPT to assist it technically. But Islamic conservatives say signing the additional protocol would sacrifice national independence to a Western “conspiracy”.

Ramazanzadeh said yesterday the government had a “positive attitude” to the protocol, while calling on the international community to “stick to its obligations” to Iran. A second IAEA team will carry out routine inspections before drawing up a report on Iran’s nuclear facilities due to be released on Sept. 8, the watchdog agency said last week.

In another development, the Tehran office of the late Ayatollah Khomeini has vehemently denied press reports published yesterday quoting the Ayatollah’s grandson calling on Iranians to launch an attack on the current regime from the holy Iraqi city of Najaf. Khomeini, who spent 15 years of his exile in Iraq, prepared for his 1979 revolution in Najaf, a city holy to Shiite Muslims.

Seyed Hussein Khomeini, 46, in two interviews with the Dutch daily Handelsblad and London based Arabic newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat was quoted as saying that Iran needed a “new democratic regime that does not use religion to suppress the people”.