VIENNA, Feb 19: Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog, will visit Iran this week to meet senior officials of the Islamic regime and urge them to sign an agreement that will allow his International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to improve monitoring of Iran’s nuclear operations.

From Saturday, ElBaradei and a team of IAEA experts will visit two new nuclear plants which Tehran unveiled in September 2002.

The government protests that the plants at Natanz, in central Iran, and at Arak, in the southwest, serve to produce nuclear energy purely for civilian purposes and are meant to help Iran depend less on foreign power suppliers.

But Washington insisted again last week that “Iran’s ambitious and costly pursuit of a complete nuclear fuel cycle only makes sense if it is in support of a nuclear weapons programme.”

Iran is a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which compels it to use atomic energy only for peaceful purposes, and has said the IAEA is welcome to inspect its plants.

The watchdog body has however for years pressed Tehran to sign “an additional protocol” to safeguard the treaty and better enable the IAEA to carry out its surveillance work, IAEA spokesman Mark Gowzdecky said this week.

The second accord was created after the 1991 Gulf War when the IAEA discovered that neighbouring Iraq, also a signatory to the NPT, had developed a secret nuclear weapons programme.

“We have encouraged Iran and all other countries to conclude this additional protocol because it would provide us with further information and access to different sites including things like uranium mines and concentration plants,” Gwozdecky said.

He added that so far only 28 countries had signed the document but said the the issue had become pertinent after Iran announced last week that uranium deposits have been discovered in central Iran.

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami announced that Tehran had discovered the uranium deposits near the central city of Yazd and had already taken steps to start exploiting them.

With the help of Russia, Iran is building its first nuclear reactor in Bushehr, which is expected to be up and running in mid-2004.

The Russian involvement serves theoretically as a safeguard, as Moscow has demanded the return of all spent fuel as a condition for going ahead with the project.

But Khatami has made clear that Iran wishes to be self-sufficient in nuclear fuel and said that with its uranium deposits his country would be able to turn out finished fuel made entirely in Iran.

ElBaradei is due to arrive in Iran, on Friday and start visiting sites on Saturday.

On Sunday he is due to meet Khatami, Iranian parliament president Mehdi Kharoubi, and Iran’s former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who heads Iran’s expediency council which arbitrates political disputes.

ElBaradei will be accompanied by IAEA deputy director general Pierre Goldschmidt, as well as Holli Heinonen, the director of the agency’s division of safeguards who is responsible for Iran.—AFP