Berlin- An Iranian businessman arrested a week ago in Germany on suspicion of illegal exports to Iran was a valued agent of the German foreign intelligence service BND, the news magazine Der Spiegel reported Saturday.

Prosecutors had advised the BND before the arrest they had no choice but to detain the man, 61, who had the code name Sindbad, because of suspicions that he was supplying equipment needed to make Iran's Shabah missiles, Spiegel said.

Islamabad, Oct. 10 : Pakistan Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has told Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki that India can join the multi-billion-dollar Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline project whenever it desires to.

Paris, Oct. 10 : International nuclear inspectors are investigating whether a Russian scientist helped Iran conduct complex experiments on how to detonate a nuclear weapon, The Telegraph quotes European and American officials, as saying.

Islamabad- Pakistan and Iran said Friday they would undertake bilaterally a proposed 7.5-billion-dollar cross-border gas pipeline if India delayed joining the project.

Moscow  - Russia denied it has plans to sell state-of-the-art missile systems to Iran, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday, in response to questions about Israeli security concerns.

"We have repeatedly declared at the highest political level that we are not going to deliver those kinds of arms into the countries which are in, to put it mildly, unstable areas," Andrei Nesterenko told journalists at a briefing in Moscow Thursday.

Baghdad  - Iran has bombed Kurdish rebel positions in villages along the Iraq-Iran border on Thursday, a senior Iraqi official has said.

"Heavy shelling began at midnight and continued for an hour," the director of Sulaymanyah Zarawa district, Ezad Wasso, told the Voices of Iraq (VOI) news agency.

The bombing targeted the areas of Razka, Mardo, Shanawa, and Arka, some 15 kilometres from the Iraq-Iran border, Wasso explained, adding that no casualties were reported.