Iran on Saturday confirmed it was producing components to make centrifuges -- the device which enriches uranium -- at a factory which it said was not secret as claimed by an opposition group.

"The factory mentioned by Monafeghin (hypocrites) is not a new discovery," state news agency IRNA quoted Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi as saying, and referring to the People's Mujahedeen of Iran, the main armed opposition group fighting the Iranian regime.

"We manufacture components (in the factory), but it is in no way a secret," Salehi said when asked about PMOI's claim that Iran produces components for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

On Thursday, PMOI spokesman in Washington Alireza Jafarzadeh claimed the Taba company site, west of Tehran, has been operating for four and a half years, citing information gathered by the group.

Taba, which in Persian stands for Iranian Cutting Tools Factory, produces "aluminium casing, magnets, molecular pumps, composite tubes, centrifuge bases," the spokesman said.

Jafarzadeh said Iran's capacity to build centrifuges, and the number operating in the country, was a critical question in determining the true intentions and goals of the Iranian nuclear programme.

But Salehi said there were "plenty of factories in the country that manufacture equipment needed by the Bushehr power plant and the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI)."

The major world powers accuse Iran of seeking to acquire a nuclear military capacity under the cover of its civilian atomic programme, a charge Tehran strongly denies.

Their main objection is to Iran's uranium enrichment programme, which can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or the fissile material for an atomic warhead.

Tehran's nuclear programme has been condemned in six UN Security Council resolutions which include four sets of economic and political sanctions, despite the fact that its enrichment activities are supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

earlier related report
Iran: Nuclear power plant to resume work early May
Tehran (AFP) April 9, 2011 - Iran said Saturday that its first nuclear power plant will resume work early May, a day after the facility's Russian contractor acknowledged reloading the fuel in the plant.

"We hope that the Bushehr power plant reaches critical phase between May 5 and 10," Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, who previously headed the Islamic republic's atomic body, was quoted as saying by Fars news agency.

He said the fuel supplied by Moscow was "removed from the reactor's core, was washed... and as of yesterday it was reloaded".

Engineers had began removing the fuel in late February due to an apparent technical fault.

Russia's Atomstroyexport agency which oversaw the Bushehr plant's construction said in a statement on Friday that the refuelling operation began after the plant had been re-checked and its various pieces "washed through".

It was not immediately clear from the statement when the Bushehr plant would be commissioned.

The plant's connection to the electric grid of Iran was initially scheduled for the end of 2010, but was then postponed to April 9 due to technical problems.

Russia last month blamed the latest delay on internal wear-and-tear at the plant, whose construction had initially started in the 1970s with the help of Germany's Siemens company.

Russia also blamed Iran for forcing its engineers to work with outdated parts in the plant.