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Iran will sign a binding international protocol in the next few days that authorises snap inspections of its nuclear sites by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi says.

Asked when Iran would put pen to paper, Kharrazi told reporters: "In the next few days".

The government gave the formal go-ahead earlier this week for the country to sign the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

This followed the decision in October to suspend the Islamic Republic's disputed uranium enrichment programme to dispel U.S.-led concern that it might be trying to produce nuclear weapons.

Kharrazi spoke to reporters on Saturday after meeting Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, who said his country might be prepared to work with Iran on civilian nuclear technology.

Iran, OPEC's second biggest oil producer, insists its nuclear programme is peaceful and is needed to meet booming domestic electricity demand and free up its finite hydrocarbon resources for export.

Kharrazi said the protocol, the subject of heated debate in Iran earlier this year, had received the ratification needed for the country's representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to sign it in Vienna.

"It had to be approved by the Supreme National Security Council, then the government and now it is under way," he said.

Government spokesman Abdollah Ramazanzadeh said on Wednesday that once Iran had signed the document, the government would send it to parliament as a bill.

If lawmakers, most of them allies of reformist President Mohammad Khatami, approved the bill, it would still need to be approved by the Guardian Council, a 12-member body dominated by conservative clerics who decide whether proposed legislation is in line with the constitution and Islamic Sharia law.

HARDLINE OPPOSITION

Several of the body's members spoke out earlier this year against signing the protocol, and many hardliners view snap nuclear inspections as tantamount to allowing spies into the country. But hardliners have been virtually silent on the issue in recent weeks.

Khatami said on Thursday that Iran would be violating the Islamic faith if it developed nuclear weapons.

"I have argued that as Muslims, our religious faith should not allow us to seek nuclear weapons," he told the World Council of Churches, an ecumenical body, in Geneva. "The Islam I know does not have a use for them."

Iran's decision to sign the NPT's snap inspection protocol followed strong pressure from international bodies, the United States and a troika formed by Britain, France and Germany.

Iran acknowledged to the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, in October, that it had hidden a secret centrifuge uranium enrighment programme from U.N. inspectors for nearly two decades.

Washington said this was proof that Tehran was secretly trying to develop nuclear weapons.

The IAEA said the laboratory-scale Iranian experiments were on too small a scale to be easily detected, and that it was "highly unlikely" that a move to industrial-scale work to develop weapons would have gone undetected.

Indian Foreign Minister Sinha, whose country has nuclear weapons, said on Saturday there was common ground for India to work with the Islamic Republic on peaceful nuclear energy.

"As far as civilian uses are concerned, there most certainly could be collaboration between Iran and India," he told reporters.

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