A general killed in a massive explosion at a munitions base last week was working on an intercontinental missile, his brother was quoted telling a government newspaper -- before demanding a retraction.

General Hassan Tehrani Moqaddam died while working on a "project related to intercontinental ballistic missiles," Mohammad Tehrani Moqaddam, a Revolutionary Guards commander, said according to a full-page interview published inside Saturday's edition of the newspaper Iran.

Mohammad Tehrani Moqaddam was quoted as saying that his brother's missile project "was in its final phase" and was "completely hi-tech and secret."

He believed the project would still be successfully completed, the Iran newspaper said.

But later Saturday the Fars news agency -- an outlet close to the Revolutionary Guards -- quoted Mohammad Tehrani Moqaddam as saying he never made the comments and was demanding a retraction from the newspaper.

"I absolutely did not make any such comment about ballistic and intercontinental missiles. I do not have any information about the country's missile (programmes)," Fars quoted him as saying.

"I also do not know what (my brother) was doing before he was martyred (died)," he said in the Fars report.

The Revolutionary Guards have repeatedly said the huge blast -- which media reports said also killed at least 35 other Guards members at the base -- was an accident, implicitly rejecting Western speculation it might have been a covert Israeli or US attack.

Hassan Tehrani Moqaddam was known as a key figure in the Revolutionary Guards' ballistic missile programme.

Officials in Tehran said he founded the programme after becoming an artillery specialist in the 1980s, during the Iraq-Iran war.

The chief of staff of Iran's armed forces, General Hassan Firouzabadi, said last Wednesday the base was being used in the production of an unspecified "experimental product" that could be used against the United States or Israel.

Firouzabadi said the development of the project had been delayed by two weeks because of the blast.

US 'failed' in IAEA bid to send Iran nuclear issue to UN
Tehran (AFP) Nov 20, 2011 - The United States "failed" to get the UN atomic energy watchdog to refer Iran's nuclear programme to the UN Security Council, Iran's deputy chief nuclear negotiator said, according to Iranian state media Sunday.

"The aim of the United States was to send the Iranian issue to the Security Council.... Thanks to the efforts of the Islamic Republic on the international stage, the American intention failed," Ali Bagheri said, according to the website of Iranian state television.

His comment was the first high-level reaction in Iran to a Friday vote by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency to pass a resolution condemning Iran's nuclear activities following a recent IAEA report strongly suggesting they involved research for atomic weapons.

The resolution -- worded to pass muster with Iran's allies Russia and China -- notably stopped short of sending the matter to the UN Security Council.

Instead, it said it was "essential for Iran and the Agency to intensify their dialogue" and called on Tehran "to comply fully and without delay with its obligations under relevant resolutions of the UN Security Council."

It gave no deadline for those demands to be met, but said IAEA head Yukiya Amano would report to the board in March on Tehran's implementation of the resolution.

The UN Security Council has already imposed four sets of sanctions on Iran to pressure it to halt its nuclear activities.

Tehran, which rejected the recent IAEA report as "baseless," and denies all Western allegations it is seeking a nuclear arsenal, has refused.

Amano said last Thursday he had proposed sending a high-level team to Iran to "clarify the issues" in the IAEA report, and asked Tehran "to engage substantively with the agency without delay."

Bagheri was quoted as saying Iran had already twice offered to host such visits before the IAEA report and board meeting.

Iran's representative at the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, was quoted by the ISNA news agency Saturday as also highlighting those offers.

"The director general's announcement that the agency is now ready to send a team of inspectors must be studied again and the result will be announced after that," he said.