THE President of Iran, mounting an improbable charm offensive in the US, insisted yesterday that talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme were moving on the right path.

President Ahmadinejad held a freewheeling hour-long press conference at UN headquarters at which, unusually, he took questions from an Israeli reporter and a bare-headed Iranian woman journalist.

“The bottom line is, we do not need a bomb,” he said.

Although he avoided a face-to-face confrontation with President Bush, Mr Ahmadinejad used his visit to the UN this week to outline his positions in television appearances and in a private meeting with foreign policy experts.

“I was hoping that on this trip I would have an opportunity to meet with people in New York to talk to them face to face, to speak with them, to see them all and for them to see me,” he told reporters. “Regrettably, the pressure of our work programme and the current conditions that we face when we travel here has not allowed me to do that. But I do hope in the future there will be an opportunity.”

Insisting that he was not “anti-Jew, Mr Ahmadinejad answered a question about his call for Israel to be “wiped off the map” by floating a plan to determine the future of the Holy Land by a referendum of all its inhabitants.

He also insisted that Iran’s nuclear programme was transparent and said he was at a loss over what to do to prove Tehran was not seeking atomic weapons.

The foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, China and the US agreed in New York this week to give Iran more time to agree to a UN demand to halt uranium enrichment as a condition for a resumption of talks on its nuclear programme.

But a European official said Mr Ahmadinejad was not crucial to the nuclear negotiations, which are handled by his former political rival Ali Larijani, who reports to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Mr Larijani cancelled his trip to the UN — the third time the meeting has been postponed — and is now expected to meet Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief, in Europe next week.

The European official said there were a number of possible explanations for Mr Larijani’s absence from New York. “One is that he is just stringing things along. Secondly, he is still trying to work the system [in Iran],” he said.

“The third is that he might not want to be in New York at the same time as Ahmadinejad because Ahmadinejad is unpredictable even in what he says to fellow Iranians and there is a degree of rivalry between them.”

Bill Clinton, the former US President, said yesterday that the US should try talking to Iran without imposing too many conditions. But he said his offer to meet Mr Ahmadinejad had been rebuffed.

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