TEHRAN, Feb 5: A defiant Iran moved on Sunday to block snap United Nations nuclear inspections and kick-start sensitive fuel work after being reported to Security Council, deepening a crisis over its disputed atomic ambitions.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissed the International Atomic Energy Agency resolution as ‘funny’ and labelled Iran’s enemies as ‘idiots’ — even though fears Iran is seeking atom bomb exposes it to the threat of greater isolation and potential sanctions.

“You can pass as many resolutions as you like and be happy about it, but you cannot stop the progress of the Iranian people. We thank God that our enemies are idiots,” he was quoted as saying by Iranian news agencies.

“We don’t need you. It is you who need the Iranian people. This is the funniest decision I’ve seen,” said the president.

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki confirmed Iran had laid down the gauntlet with immediate retaliation.

“All voluntary measures taken over the past two-and-a-half or three years have been halted and we have no further commitment to the additional protocol and other voluntary commitments,” he told a news conference.

“This resolution has no legal basis. All it does is simply remove the opportunity for voluntary cooperation between Iran and the agency.”

The additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) gives the IAEA stronger inspection powers and is central to the UN watchdog’s three-year-old effort to determine what Iran is actually up to.

Mr Mottaki did not specify what other steps had already been taken, but Iran’s voluntary measures had notably included a freeze on uranium enrichment — a process that can also be used to make the fissile core of a nuclear bomb.

Iran says it only wants to enrich uranium to make reactor fuel.

US President George Bush, however, said the resolution ‘is not the end of diplomacy or the IAEA’s role’ and merely the ‘beginning of an intensified diplomatic effort’.—-AFP