UN probes possible Iran-Pak nuke link

Diplomats said the agency was trying to determine whether the drawings had come from someone in Pakistan or elsewhere.

Tehran, accused by Washington of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, told the UN nuclear agency it got the blueprints from a "middleman" whose identity the agency had not determined, a Western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

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It was unclear where the "middleman" got the drawings. The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said in a report Iran told the IAEA it got centrifuge drawings "from a foreign intermediary around 1987."

Centrifuges are used to purify uranium for use as fuel or in weapons. Experts say the ability to produce such material is crucial for an arms program and the biggest hurdle any country with ambitions to build a bomb must overcome.

Several diplomats familiar with the IAEA said the blueprints were of a machine by the Dutch enrichment unit of the British-Dutch-German consortium Urenco -- a leader in the field of centrifuges.

Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Reuters he had no knowledge a Urenco design had been used by Iran. "This is new information to me," he said.

In a statement to Reuters, Urenco said it had not supplied any centrifuge know-how or machinery to Iran.

"Urenco would like to strongly affirm that they have never supplied any technology or components to Iran at any time," it said.

Pakistan, which non-proliferation experts and diplomats say used the Urenco blueprint, and Iran have repeatedly denied any cooperation in the nuclear field.

Iran had long insisted its centrifuge program was purely indigenous and that it had received no outside help whatsoever -- not from Pakistan or anywhere else.

The father of Pakistan's atom bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, worked at the Urenco uranium enrichment facility in the Dutch city of Almelo in the 1970s.

After his return to Pakistan he was convicted in absentia of nuclear espionage by an Amsterdam court, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. He has acknowledged he did take advantage of his experience of many years of working on similar projects in Europe and his contacts with various manufacturing firms.

But David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector and head of the Institute for Science and International Security think-tank, said: "Khan is widely believed to have taken these drawings and developed them."