A top Iranian cleric Friday told the U.N. Security Council to stay out of the crisis over Tehran's contested nuclear drive, ahead of a key report by the U.N. atomic watchdog.
Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani told worshippers at the weekly Muslim prayers that the Security Council -- which has already imposed two sets of sanctions against Iran -- was not competent to handle its nuclear file.
"The United States, Israel and Britain -- in other words Jewish Zionism and Christian Zionism -- are trying to resist in the face of Islam and (Iran's) Islamic system," he said in the sermon broadcast on state radio.
"They say we need to go to the Security Council, and to adopt a resolution against Iran.
But "the Council does not have the competence to examine a scientific dossier. The Council should examine security issues and the problems that you (the world powers) created yourselves."
The International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei was to release his latest report on the Iranian nuclear program to the body's governing board in Vienna later Friday, Iranian state media reported.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili has called a news conference for later Friday to respond to the report.
The contents of the report will be important on determining the future course of the nuclear standoff, with the U.S. leading Western calls for a further set of U.N. sanctions against Tehran.
Kashani repeated Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, saying it is "scientific and not a work of destruction to set the world on fire."
But Western powers fear Iran could use uranium enrichment technology, which can be used both to make nuclear fuel and the core of an atomic bomb, to make a nuclear weapon.
A defiant Iran has repeatedly refused to halt its enrichment of uranium.
Key European powers Thursday formally introduced an amended package of new sanctions in the Security Council in the hope of agreeing a new resolution next week.