US would regret any attack,

A top Iranian cleric on Friday warned Israel and the United States that they would be made to regret any attack against Iran, amid mounting tensions in the nuclear crisis. ‘You liar Israel and you liar the White House... if you want to make an invasion we will give you such a response that you will regret your move,’ Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani said in a Friday prayers sermon broadcast on state radio. Tensions over the nuclear standoff have again surged in the past two days after Iran test-fired a broadside of missiles – including one it says puts it within range of Israel – in war games that provoked international concern. Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, will hold talks on ending the atomic standoff on July 19 in Geneva, the official IRNA news agency reported on Friday. ‘They are to continue their negotiations about the package on Saturday, July 19,’ IRNA quoted Ahmad Khadem al-Melleh, spokesman for the secretariat of Iran’s supreme national security council, as saying. Meanwhile, Iran’s recent missile tests showed the limited range of Tehran’s arsenal and proved that a planned US missile defence shield in Europe is unnecessary, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Friday. ‘The tests in Iran confirm that Iran has missiles with a range of up to 2,000 kilometres and confirm... that a missile defence shield with these parameters is not needed to monitor or react to such threats,’ he said. ‘We believe that any issue related to Iran should be resolved through negotiation, through political-diplomatic means... and not through threats,’ Lavrov told reporters in Moscow after talks with his Jordanian counterpart. The Russian minister said the United States could push ahead with its plans to set up a new missile defence system in Europe. ‘But these will be unilateral steps at a time when what is needed is collective measures, collective agreements,’ Lavrov said. His comments came three days after the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, signed an agreement in Prague formally permitting the United States to set up a high-powered radar in the Czech Republic as part of the new missile shield. The president, Dmitry Medvedev, said immediately afterwards that Russia was ‘most distressed’ by the US moves, which Moscow says in their current form pose a direct threat to Russian national security. Moscow said this week it had no choice but to respond to the US missile defence moves with ‘concrete’ military steps of its own, heightening concern about a renewed Washington-Moscow arms race. The United States rejects Russia’s fears about the system, saying it is meant to defend against missile threats from ‘rogue’ states such as Iran and North Korea.