MOSCOW, Feb 17, (Agencies): Moscow has delayed the delivery of advanced air defence missiles to Iran, Russian officials said Wednesday, in the latest sign of strained ties between Moscow and Tehran.
The announcement of the delay in the controversial contract to sell S-300 missiles to Iran came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Moscow in a bid to add new pressure on Iran.
“The delay is due to technical problems. The delivery will be carried out when they are resolved,” Alexander Fomin, deputy head of Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation, told Interfax news agency.
Fomin, whose service oversees Russian arms exports, made the comments while attending a defence exhibition in New Delhi. He did not clarify what the problems were or how long it would take to fix them.

The engineer in charge of building the S-300s said there were nothing wrong with the missiles and called the delay a political decision.
“There are no technical problems with the S-300 systems. This is a political issue,” Vladimir Kasparyants, head constructor of air defence systems at Almaz-Antey, the company that builds the S-300, told Interfax.
Russia’s S-300 contract with Iran has raised hackles in the United States and Israel, which believe that Tehran could use the missiles to defend its nuclear facilities against attack.
Western powers suspect that Iran is seeking to build an atomic bomb under the guise of its civilian nuclear energy programme, although Tehran says the programme is peaceful in nature.
Neither the United States nor Israel have ruled out air strikes in order to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Analysts say that S-300s could greatly complicate such air strikes.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said her country has no plan for military action against Iran over its nuclear programme, in a television interview broadcast on Wednesday.
“Obviously, we don’t want Iran to become a nuclear weapons power, but we are not planning anything other than going for sanctions,” she told Al-Arabiya television.
“What we are focusing on is trying to change Iranian behaviour, and the international community has been united in trying to send a message to Iran that it is time for it to clarify its intentions,” she said.
“We want to try to get the strongest sanctions we can out of the United Nations Security Council ... mostly to influence their decision-making,” said Clinton, interviewed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Tuesday at the end of a Gulf tour.
On Israel’s refusal to rule out the military option against its arch-foe Iran, which denies charges of aiming to build a nuclear bomb, she said “there are many countries in the region who are very worried about Iran’s actions.
“And there may well be those who think, well, we have to do something to protect ourselves,” said Clinton.

Accused
In Tehran, Iran’s supreme leader accused the United States on Wednesday of war-mongering and of turning the Gulf into an “arms depot”, hitting back at US accusations that the Islamic state was moving towards a military dictatorship.
The comments by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were the latest sign of growing tensions between Tehran and Washington, which are embroiled in a long-running and escalating row over Iranian nuclear work the West suspects is aimed at making bombs.
The United States is leading a push for the UN Security Council to impose a fourth round of sanctions on Iran, which says its nuclear programme is solely to generate electricity so it can export more of its oil and gas.
Last month, US officials said the United States had expanded land- and sea-based missile defence systems in and around the Gulf — a waterway crucial for global oil supplies — to counter what it sees as Iran’s growing missile threat.
Clinton said on Monday the United States believed Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were driving the country towards military dictatorship and should be targeted in any new UN sanctions.
In an apparent reference to Clinton’s visit to the Middle East earlier this week, Khamenei said the Americans had dispatched “their agent” to the region to accuse Iran’s Islamic system of government.
“But no one believes these lies because they know that America is the real war-mongering state. They have turned the Persian Gulf into an arms depot,” Khamenei said.

“They invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and are now accusing the Islamic Republic. Everybody knows that the Islamic Republic is for peace and brotherhood among all Islamic states in the world,” Khamenei said, state television reported.
Khamenei said on Wednesday that the mass rallies which marked the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution had “punched” those who oppose the Islamic republic.
“Those who acted according to the will of enemies think they will get somewhere if they provoke people,” Khamenei told visitors from the northwestern city of Tabriz who had come to meet him.
“They predicted for some time that the 22nd of Bahman (Feb 11) will turn into a civil war, but the nation wisely punched in the mouth all these opponents,” the all-powerful Khamenei said, referring to the opposition movement as well as Western powers.
On Feb 11, Iranians took part in mass rallies in Tehran and other cities to mark the 31st anniversary of the 1979 revolution which toppled the US-backed shah.

Isotopes
Iran will not suspend its sensitive high level enrichment in return for radioisotopes as offered in a letter by three world powers to the UN atomic watchdog, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday.
“It is not at all rational to say that Iran should not produce (isotopes and uranium) and stop its (enrichment) plant and that they will provide its needed medicine,” ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told ISNA news agency.
“We will not examine offers which lead to the shutting down of Tehran reactor,” said the spokesman, in an almost word-for-word repetition of a statement he made on February 10.
Iran started enriching uranium to 20 percent on February 9 to fuel its Tehran research reactor making medical radioisotopes amid international concern over its atomic ambitions.
Amid the threat of new sanctions President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday that negotiations over the IAEA-drafted nuclear fuel exchange were “not closed yet.”
He expressed readiness to buy the material from abroad, even from Iran’s arch-foe the United States.

Rejected
In Geneva, Iran has rejected western calls to allow in the UN expert on torture and for wider investigations into post-election violence, a United Nations report showed on Wednesday.
Tehran, which had maintained this week that there was a standing invitation for UN rights experts, agreed to respond by June to a broad recommendation that it accept requests for visits.
However, it rejected specific calls by Australia, Britain, France and the United States to allow visits by the special rapporteurs on torture and on the independence of judges and lawyers.
“The recommendations... did not enjoy the support of Iran,” according to the official report on the 47-member UN Human Rights Council’s review of Iran, which took place on Monday.
Iran’s then reformist President Mohammad Khatami implemented the standing invitation to all UN human rights experts in 2003.
However, the United Nations says they have been unable gain access since 2005, a period that coincides with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency.
Britain’s recommendation that Iran invite the UN Secretary-General to investigate violence since last June’s presidential election, as well as calls for a domestic inquiry, were also rejected.

Detained
Meanwhile, five foreigners, including a French national, a Japanese reporter and two Russians, were detained during the Feb 11 rallies marking the anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, a prosecutor said on Wednesday.
Three of them were later released, but the case of one of the Russians and that of a detained Afghan national had been handed over to the judiciary, prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi told the ISNA news agency. He did not give any names.
Iran has accused its Western enemies of stoking street unrest that erupted after the Islamic Republic’s disputed election in June, which plunged the the country into its deepest internal crisis since the revolution three decades ago.
Jafari Dolatabadi said the five were detained during the rallies, without making clear if they were all held in Tehran.
“(The case of) one Afghan was handed over to the judiciary because of taking part in an illegal gathering (in western Tehran) ... on the sideline of the main rallies,” he said, apparently referring to an opposition rally.
“A Russian national, who was arrested for illegally entering the country, was handed over to the judiciary and the Revolutionary Court is studying the case,” the prosecutor added.