VIENNA, June 17: The UN nuclear watchdog was forced to make an embarrassing admission on Thursday, that it had wrongly accused Iran of withholding information about imports of potentially weapons-related technology.

Iran seized on the admission as proof that it is providing full and timely information on its atomic programme, which it says is purely for generating electricity but which the United States believes is a front for developing nuclear weapons.

The disclosure was made as representatives of France, Germany and Britain continued to meet board members of the nuclear watchdog in Vienna to strike a compromise on the wording of a resolution that sharply rebukes Tehran for poor cooperation.

A non-aligned diplomat said Iran's case for softening the resolution had been strengthened by the fact that mistakes had clearly been made on both sides. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a June 1 report Iran did not declare until April that it had imported essential parts for advanced P-2 centrifuges used to purify uranium for use in atomic power plants or weapons.

But the Iranians this week produced a tape recording of an Iranian businessman who imported the parts telling an IAEA inspector verbally in January. "This was made in an oral statement at the end of a particular meeting with one individual whose English was not very clear to us... It's a fault that we did not pick it up, it was not fed to our system," IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei asserted.

A senior Iranian official said this showed the charge in IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei's June 1 report that Iran had provided changing and contradictory information was "completely wrong".

"This has been a big mistake," Hossein Mousavian, secretary of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told reporters on the sidelines of an IAEA board meeting expected to rebuke Iran for patchy cooperation.

"It shows Iranian cooperation, Iranian information has been full and precise, on time, with no contradictions and no changes." Iran welcomed the fact that the IAEA had corrected the error, which he called an "innocent mistake", but the report had tainted the whole atmosphere of the meeting.