TEHRAN, July 18: Iran said on Sunday that suspected Al Qaeda members involved in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks may have passed through its territory, but insisted they would have done so "illegally".

"We have very long borders and it is impossible to totally control them," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters. "It is natural that five of six people could have crossed our borders illegally without us seeing them," he insisted. "The same thing happens on the border between the United States and Mexico."

Mr Asefi was responding to the September 11 commission report, due out Thursday in the United States, which according to US media reports, alleges that Iran may have helped in the attacks by providing eight to 10 Al Qaeda hijackers with safe passage to and from training camps in Afghanistan.

Time and Newsweek, in similar reports quoting congressional, commission and government sources, said Iran relaxed border controls and provided "clean" passports for the so-called "muscle hijackers" to transit Iran to and from Osama bin Laden's camps between October 2000 and February 2001.

Iran condemned the attacks, but has frequently been accused of harbouring and not cracking down on the group. And in February, Spain's top anti-terror judge Baltasar Garzon alleged that Al Qaeda had a "board of managers" operating in Iran. But the regime was seen as being fiercely hostile to Afghanistan's Taliban and Al Qaeda, and has vehemently denied allegations that it is supporting them.

In late 1998 Iran even went to the brink of attacking Afghanistan in retaliation for the murder of a number of its diplomats by the Taliban in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif. "After September 11, we reinforced our border controls. But before September 11, who knew what was going to happen?" Mr Asefi asserted. -AFP