LONDON, May 27: Iran said on Monday that international inspectors would monitor the construction of a Russian-designed nuclear power plant, which the United States believes is the biggest nuclear proliferation threat worldwide.

The head of Iran’s parliamentary energy commission Hossein Aferideh said the International Atomic Energy Agency planned several visits over the course of the year to the Bushehr plant.

“We are going to construct a power plant for the production of electricity under direct observation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) so this is peaceful application of nuclear energy,” he told reporters at a conference in London.

“We are members of the International Atomic Energy Agency so we are following the rules of the IAEA and investigators from the agency are visiting routinely Iran.”

The issue was the main sticking point during an otherwise harmonious summit last week between US President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Bush has labelled Iran part of an “axis of evil”, accusing Tehran of seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring terrorism.

Aferideh said the plant was scheduled to come on line at the end of next year or early in 2004 to help satisfy growing Iranian electricity demand.

“So far the project is going very well. We have more than 1,000 Russian experts there,” he told reporters.

Bush said last week on a European trip that Russia should be concerned about nuclear proliferation to Iran, which could one day view Moscow as an enemy.

A senior Bush official on the same trip said Iran’s nuclear programme was the “single-most important proliferation threat there is”.

The IAEA, an arm of the United Nations, said it was already advising on safe construction of the plant, though full inspections under a “safeguards agreement” dating from 1974 would not begin until nuclear material was delivered.

“The IAEA has visited the site, but regular IAEA inspections will begin with the initial receipt of nuclear material at the facility,” IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming told Reuters. “That should call for about four to six inspections per year.”

The IAEA safeguards agreement requires that a country declare all civilian nuclear material and permit regular inspections by the agency.

Each visit from the the Vienna-based IAEA would consist of several inspectors and last a couple of weeks, Aferideh said.

“This is an Iranian right to produce electricity by nuclear power and nothing to do with non-peaceful application,” Aferideh said.

His comments followed a statement from Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi on Sunday in which he told the official Iranian news agency that the construction of the reactor was under the IAEA’s supervision.—Reuters