TEHRAN, 29 September 2004 — Iran’s hard-line lawmakers could try to force President Mohammad Khatami’s government to follow North Korea’s example and quit the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the official IRNA news agency said yesterday.

Leading conservative parliamentarian Hassan Kamran has prepared a bill for submission to Parliament that would force the government to set a November deadline for the UN nuclear watchdog to take Iran off the agency’s agenda, IRNA said.

“The bill obliges the government to pull out of the NPT if the International Atomic Energy Agency does not meet the deadline,” IRNA quoted Kamran as saying.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has threatened it will take tough action against Iran at its November meeting if it defies the agency’s call to stop uranium enrichment.

Iran insists its network of nuclear facilities are geared to produce atomic power, not bombs. Iran’s Foreign Minister said Iran did not intend to pull out of the NPT: “No that is not our policy,” said Kamal Kharrazi when questioned on CNN yesterday. “We are sticking to NPT”. The bill by Kamran, a member of Parliament’s Foreign Affairs and National Security commission, will be submitted to Parliament if it is backed by 15 out of 290 lawmakers.

Kamran said he was seeking special triple-urgency status for the bill. If accepted by two-thirds of lawmakers, Parliament would have to discuss it immediately. It would then go to the Guardian Council, a watchdog body, before becoming law.

Some sections of Iran’s establishment have called for the country to withdraw from the NPT in return to the IAEA’s “hostile stance”. But the government has assured the world that it had no intention to end its co-operation with the IAEA.

Kamran said the government would be obliged to end its “voluntarily undertakings” to the IAEA as well if the bill passed into law.

International pressure forced Tehran last year to agree to snap checks of its nuclear sites and to halt the enrichment of uranium, a process that can be used to develop nuclear weapons. Reformist lawmakers said they were against the bill. “We believe in more co-operation with the IAEA,” Nureddin Pirmoazen told Reuters. He added: “But we are in minority in Parliament”.

Meanwhile, an Iranian journalist who has worked on the political pages of two reformist dailies has been arrested, his wife told the student news agency ISNA yesterday.

Rozbeh Mir-Ebrahimi, who has worked for Etemad and Jomhuriat newspapers, “was arrested by people who said they were from the police” Monday morning, Sulmaz Sharifi said. The Jomhuriat newspaper was closed down by the judiciary in July.