BRUSSELS, 3 March 2004 — The head of the UN nuclear watchdog said yesterday Iran was cooperating better with global non-proliferation efforts and voiced confidence that it would make good on a pledge to suspend uranium enrichment activities.

“If you look at the big picture, we are clearly moving in the right direction. If you compare where we were a year ago and where we are today, that’s a sea change,” Mohamed El-Baradei told reporters in Brussels, a week before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board considers his latest report on Iran.

“I hope, sometime in the future — should Iran continue to cooperate, continue to give us all the details - we should be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel.”

He said North Korea rather than Iran was now the “number one proliferation concern” because Pyongyang had the capability to reprocess plutonium for a weapon and it felt very insecure.

El-Baradei declined to predict whether the 35-nation IAEA board would censure Tehran at its meeting starting on March 8.

His report last week said Iran had not answered several outstanding questions about its atomic program, prompting the United States to say Iran had not clearly shown it had abandoned efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

The oil-producing state insists its nuclear effort is for purely peaceful purposes, to generate electricity.

El-Baradei said that although there had been some “bad news” alongside “good news” in his report, he fully expected Tehran to meet the commitment it made last week to issue instructions for a halt to all uranium enrichment.

“I think they said they are going to issue that on March 1 ...and I have no doubt that they will issue this instruction,” he said. “We are on the ground and we will be verifying that.” El-Baradei said the UN agency had urged Islamabad to provide particle samples to verify Iran’s explanation that traces of enriched uranium found at sites in the country came from equipment imported from Pakistan.

“We told them that it is really important for us to get particle samples from Pakistan,” he said. “This really is the most important outstanding issue still in Iran...which really raises the question of whether these are just contaminations through imports or a question of undeclared nuclear material.”