TEHRAN, March 7: Iran called on Sunday for the UN's atomic watchdog to finish a 13-month probe of its nuclear programme and take the Islamic republic off the agency's agenda.

Supreme National Security Council chief Hassan Rohani said it was time for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to confirm Iran's innocence of any wrongdoing.

"The case concerning Iran's peaceful nuclear activities should be completely closed at the IAEA board of governors and removed from its agenda," he was quoted as saying by state television.

Rohani was speaking ahead of a meeting in Vienna of the IAEA board of governors, which will consider a new report by the agency showing Iran failed to report sensitive research involving advanced uranium enrichment centrifuges and potentially arms-related experiments.

He said the world must accept the Islamic Republic's right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

The IAEA launched an intense inspection process after IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei visited Tehran in February last year.

The investigation began after an exiled opposition group accused Tehran the previous August of hiding an underground enrichment facility and other sites from the UN watchdog.

In Vienna, diplomats on the IAEA's 35-nation board said they were working a draft IAEA resolution on Iran circulated by the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. They said it would require some fine-tuning but was something that could eventually be approved by the entire board.

"(The draft) is a text that is supposed to represent the views of many countries," a Western diplomat who follows the IAEA closely said about the resolution, adding that it combined "some criticism and some praise".

NUCLEAR POWER: The United States accuses Iran of running a secret nuclear arms programme in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has called for the IAEA board to declare Tehran in "non-compliance" and report it to the UN Security Council.