"We don't want to change the arrangement of five-percent enrichment merely to produce 150 to 300 kilos of 20-percent (enriched) fuel," ILNA news agency quoted Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation chief Ali Akbar Salehi as saying.

He said Iran needs 20-percent fuel for its research reactor in Tehran, but it will reportedly ask to import enriched fuel of that level when it meets world powers in Geneva on October 1 for talks on its nuclear programme.

Uranium enrichment lies at the centre of fears over Iran's controversial atomic work as the process to make nuclear fuel can also be used to make the fissile core of an atom bomb in much higher purifications of over 90 percent.

On Friday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Tehran wrote to the agency on September 21 disclosing that it is building a new uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom.

Iran's other enrichment plant is in Natanz located in the central Isfahan province.

The announcement of the new plant triggered anger among Western powers who said Iran was building the facility in secret but Tehran insisted it was not hiding anything and said the facility would be put under IAEA supervision.

Iran's envoy to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh lashed out at world leaders, especially US President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

He said he informed the IAEA on September 21, telling the nuclear watchdog that the new plant would be operational in about 540 days. Under the agency's clause 153 there were no obligations to inform the IAEA sooner, he said.

"It is a pity that none of these three leaders have legal advisers to inform them that according to comprehensive safeguards we are only obliged to inform six months before we put nuclear material" inside the facility, he said.

"This site does not have any nuclear material at all now," he said in an interview with state-owned English language television Press TV.

"The problem is that we are the victim of negligence of those who claim that they know in fact the international law. They are talking in the UN but they are not aware of the very principles of the Statute of the IAEA," an angry Soltanieh said.

The executive editor of the English language Iran Daily, Amin Sabooni, backed Soltanieh's view.

"The way the West has reacted is completely preposterous. The Western world should learn to mind its own business and let others mind theirs," Sabooni told AFP. He said Tehran was "right" in pursuing nuclear technology.

Tehran insists it has a right to enrichment to make nuclear fuel for power plants as a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

"The Natanz and Qom facilities complement each other and we don't want to produce all the fuel needed for our reactors there. What we mean to say is that if they restrain us in the process of generating energy from nuclear fuel, we have the capability to make fuel," Salehi said.

"If we had wanted to create the new plant for high-level enrichment we would not have declared it."

Iran has been under mounting international pressure to halt enrichment and has defiantly pressed ahead with the sensitive work despite five UN Security Council resolutions, including three sets of sanctions.

World powers have threatened Iran with more sanctions if the Geneva talks fail.

The talks will be attended by officials of the six world powers -- Britain, France, Russia, China, Germany and the United States -- and Iran's nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili.

The United States and Islamic republic's arch-foe Israel have never ruled out a military option to thwart Tehran's atomic drive.

Widely considered to be the region's sole if undeclared nuclear power, Israel along with the West thinks Iran is trying to develop atomic weapons under the guise of its controversial nuclear programme, a charge Tehran denies.

Meanwhile Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, which enjoys good ties with both Iran and the West, warned that any military attack against its eastern neighbour Iran would be an act of "insanity."

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