Iran's ambassador to Italy has claimed that Western agents attempted to assassinate his country's President using radiation poisoning during a trip to Rome.

Abolfazl Zohrehvand was quoted by the Iranian state news agency as saying that the plot to take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's life would have involved inflicting him with extreme radiation poisoning at the place where he stayed during the UN World Food Summit.

The allegations came after Mr Ahmadinejad, who the West claims is trying to develop nuclear weapons, claimed that he had been the target of an assassination plot during his trip to Iraq last March.

Explaining what he claimed was the latest plot, Mr Zohrehvand said that the regular radiation level of X-ray machines was "300" millirems but on the machine at his Rome hotel it had reached "800".

"One day before Ahmadinejad's trip, I checked and found out that the X-ray machine set up in the place where he was staying gave off excessive radiation," Mr Zohrehvand said.

"First we suspected the machine was broken and after replacing it with another one it turned out that the radiation was controlled from another source.

"When the president entered this place, the radiation increased and exceeded '1,000' so that the intensity of the radiation was completely felt inside the building."

The diplomat did not say if the place where Ahmadinejad was staying was a hotel or official residence.

Mr Ahmadinejad had previously claimed that plans had been made to kidnap him when he visited Iraq last March, but that it had been foiled when his delegation altered their travel plans.

The claims were widely ridiculed, however, by Iranian reformist newspapers which pointed out that, had the US wanted to kidnap Mr Ahmadinejad, they would have done so when he was in New York to attend the UN General Assembly.

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