The foreign ministry said in a statement that The Sunday Telegraph's article quoting unnamed Western intelligence officers "aimed only at creating a false impression in British and international society about Russian policy in the area of missile non-proliferation."

Similar articles "unfortunately appear quite regularly in the Western media."

The ministry asked whether "the Sunday Telegraph article was not politically commissioned. In that case, there is a clear question: who commissioned it and who paid? The British newspaper should respond."

This was the second high-level reaction to the article, which was published Sunday, a day after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice feuded openly with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Moscow over Iran's nuclear programme.

On Monday, Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov called the article "delirium, nonsense."

The article quoted unnamed sources as saying that the Russians were middlemen in a multi-million-dollar (-euro) deal on secret missile technology negotiated between Iran and North Korea in 2003.

"It has enabled Teheran to receive regular clandestine shipments of top-secret missile technology, believed to be channelled through Russia," the newspaper reported in a front-page article.