ISLAMABAD - Pakistan on Sunday said that President Pervez Musharraf had been incorrectly quoted by a German magazine, which reported him as saying Iran wanted nuclear weapons.
"The President has not been correctly reported," foreign ministry spokesman Jalil Abass Jilani told AFP.
Jilani said that President was asked whether Iran was anxious to develop a nuclear bomb, to which the President replied that he "does not know", Jilani said.
Iran on Sunday demanded that Musharraf explain his claim that Tehran was keen to obtain a nuclear bomb -- a statement that was at odds with the clerical regime's repeated denials.
In an interview with Germany's Der Spiegel magazine published on Saturday, Musharraf was quoted as saying that Iran was "very anxious to have the bomb" -- something Iran said it hoped was a misquote.
In a major turnaround, Pakistan on Thursday confirmed that it had sent some parts of an old centrifuge to the UN's atomic agency to help it establish whether Iran had been secretly developing nuclear weapons.
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) requested the parts in connection with its investigations to determine whether contamination found at Iran's nuclear facilities had come from Pakistan or any other source, a foreign ministry official said.
The transfer marks an about-face for Islamabad, which had insisted it would not surrender the machine components, despite admitting that disgraced Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan had given centrifuges to Tehran.
05/29/2005 13:47 GMT