Iran to become loser without sanctions suspended in nuclear deal: official

TEHRAN, Nov. 15 (Xinhua) -- A senior Iranian official said on Sunday that Iran will be the loser if its enriched uranium is exchanged without the imposed sanctions on the country being suspended, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

Mohsen Rezaee, former commander of Islamic Revolution Guards Corps and currently the Secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council of the Islamic Republic, said that, "In my opinion, the suspension of sanctions by the west is their proper response to build confidence."

"If we cannot obtain this privilege from them, we will, in practice, be the loser of this political deal (of nuclear exchange) as we were in the past," Rezaee was quoted as saying.

He pointed out that in the past, Iran, voluntarily and in order to build confidence, suspended its nuclear activities and signed Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), but it did not receive deserving confidence-building response from the west.

"In the past, the U.S. President Barack Obama had asked Iran to hand over large amount, 75 percent, of its uranium to them in order to build confidence. It naturally can be the subject of a political deal," Rezaee said, adding that "the suspension of Iran's sanctions by the west can be their proper response."

A draft agreement, presented earlier by chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei, has called for shipping most of Iran's existing low-grade enriched uranium to Russia, and France to be processed into fuel rods with a purity of 20 percent as the fuel for Tehran's research reactor.

However, Tehran has said that requiring it to hand over huge amounts of its enriched uranium in exchange for nuclear fuel for the Tehran research reactor is a digressive issue and not acceptable.

Iran has threatened that in case of pressures on Iran, the country will buy its high-grade enriched uranium from foreign suppliers without exchange of its low-enriched uranium.

The United States, Russia and France have approved the draft deal, but Iran said it wanted amendments and more talks on the issue.