Iran's president has denied his government violated International Atomic Energy Agency rules after disclosing the existence of a new nuclear-enrichment facility to the UN watchdog.
Speaking in Tehran on Saturday, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his country had in fact informed the IAEA a full year in advance of the deadline set by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
"If you want to build the building, you can do that. If you want to lay the pipes, you can do that. Six months before you start processing itself ... then you need to inform the IAEA so it is prepared to begin its inspection programme," Ahmadinejad said.
"Now is this the right thing or the wrong thing to do?" he asked. "It is not a secret facility. If it was, why did we inform the IAEA a year ahead of time?"
Even as he insisted that Iran, as a sovereign state, did not need to report to Washington, Ahmadinejad said that Tehran would allow IAEA inspectors to visit the site.
Marc Vidricaire, an IAEA spokesman, told Al Jazeera on Friday that Tehran had notified the body of the second enrichment plant's existence in a letter earlier this week.
Iran was previously known to have one enrichment plant at Natanz, in central Isfahan province, which is under daily surveillance by IAEA inspectors.
The New York Times reported that the facility was being built inside a mountain near the city of Qom, where Iran's supreme leader and the country's influential religious leadership are based.
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