Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Friday that Tehran would not use oil as a weapon in the row over its nuclear programme and was open to compromise, comments that caused the price of oil to plummet.
But the head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, said it was up to the Iranians to create the conditions for a resumption of collapsed negotiations aimed at resolving its nuclear standoff with the West.
Mottaki stressed that Iran would not give up its right to develop nuclear energy for civilian use, which he said was enshrined in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
"We're not going to use energy as a political leverage," Mottaki told reporters in Geneva, where he is on a two-day visit.
Iranian state television said on Friday the country's armed forces successfully test fired a domestically-produced missile which can evade radar, a development analysts said could be worrying for Western forces in the Gulf.
But Israeli missile expert Uzi Rubin said the missiles did not the match the description and sounded like the Russian Iskander-E missile.
"They could be bluffing," Rubin, a former director of Israel's Arrow missile defense programme, told Reuters.
The recent decision of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to pass Iran's nuclear dossier to the UN Security Council has raised fears that the fourth-largest oil exporter might retaliate by cutting off its oil supply.