Iran has invited an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team to Teheran to work on a plan for clearing up suspicions about its nuclear program, an IAEA spokeswoman said on Monday.

Apparently calculated to blunt the threat of new UN sanctions, the move could increase pressure on the United States and its closest allies to reconsider their insistence that Iran fully freeze all uranium enrichment activities.

During a meeting on Sunday with IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, Ali Larijani, Teheran's chief nuclear negotiator, "invited the IAEA to send a team to Teheran to develop an action plan for resolving outstanding issues related to Iran's past nuclear program," said agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming.

"The IAEA intends to send a team as early as practicable," she said in a statement.

The talks on Sunday were apparently agreed on short notice and came just a day after Larijani met with top EU foreign policy envoy Javier Solana for talks focused on Teheran's recent offer to deal with outstanding questions.

A European diplomat familiar with the talks said the decision to invite an IAEA delegation was reached at those talks with Solana, and that Larijani had asked for 120 days to clear up ambiguities - a time span that Solana rejected as too long.

Asked what Solana considered a reasonable amount of time, the diplomat, who demanded anonymity in exchange for discussing the confidential talks, said: "Weeks - and not very many."

Larijani and ElBaradei had already met on Friday and the IAEA chief said afterward that the Islamic republic was ready to follow up on that offer by working out a concrete timetable with his agency's experts on coming up with the answers sought by the UN nuclear agency.

A diplomat familiar with Iran's nuclear file described the offer as "the first break in the (nuclear) stalemate in months".

(China Daily via agencies June 26, 2007)