BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, 2 June 2004 — The chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday his agency has not found proof to date of a concrete link between Iran’s nuclear activities and its military program, but said it was premature to make a judgment.

Mohammed El-Baradei, the IAEA director general who addressed a NATO Parliamentary Assembly meeting in the Slovak capital, said there was still some work to do regarding Iran.

Agency experts were still probing into whether “the Iranian program has been designated exclusively for peaceful purposes or has a military dimension,” El-Baradei said. He added, “We haven’t seen a concrete proof of a link to the military program, but as I said it’s premature to make a judgment.”

El-Baradei plans to present an assessment of Iran’s nuclear activities to the IAEA board of governors in June. The United States and other nations accuse Iran of running a covert program to develop nuclear weapons and is pushing the United Nations to impose sanctions. Iran has rejected the US allegations, saying its nuclear program is geared only toward generating electricity.

El-Baradei said if the agency thought that “Security Council (action) is needed, I think the members of the agency (board) wouldn’t hesitate to take that course of action.”

Concerns over Iran’s nuclear program mounted after IAEA inspectors found traces of highly enriched uranium at two Iranian sites. Iran said the uranium was already on materials imported from abroad. Inspectors have also discovered an advanced P2 centrifuge program that Iran had not reported to the UN agency. Iran agreed last year, under international pressure, to suspend uranium enrichment and allow intrusive inspection of its nuclear facilities.

Meanwhile, Iran’s hard-line judiciary has quashed a death sentence for blasphemy against dissident intellectual Hashem Aghajari, a spokesman announced in Tehran yesterday, in a move that could remove a major source of tension in the Islamic republic.

The spokesman, Gholamhossein Elham, confirmed to the student news agency ISNA that the Supreme Court had again scrapped a ruling that had sparked major student protests and badly damaged Iran’s image abroad.

Aghajari’s defense lawyer, Saleh Nikbakht, told AFP that he had yet to be informed of the decision, although the sympathetic Supreme Court ruling has been anticipated for several weeks.

A history professor at Tehran University who lost a leg in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War, Aghajari was convicted of blasphemy by a judge in the western city of Hamadan in November 2002 after he called for a reformation in Iran’s state religion. He had said in a speech to students there that Muslims were not “monkeys” and “should not blindly follow” religious leaders.

In another development, hundreds of women held a brief rally yesterday in front of the British Embassy in Tehran, the latest protest sparked by US-led coalition’s military action in Iraq’s holy Shiite cities in Iraq. During the largely calm demonstration by up to 800 Islamist women, there was only minor stone-throwing at the embassy walls coupled with the shouting of slogans.

They included US President George W. “Bush is a criminal, (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair supports him”, “Occupiers should be expelled”, and calls for the closure of the mission and expulsion of London’s ambassador, Richard Dalton.

But there was no repeat of the scenes witnessed last month when, during a string of demonstrations, angry crowds clashed with security forces and tried to storm the leafy downtown compound.