Iranian authorities were Sunday starting to draw up a multi-million-dollar reconstruction plan for earthquake-hit Bam, but the foreign ministry said the time was not yet right to receive a high-level US delegation to follow up on Washington's dispatch of aid.
With almost all of the 30,000 or so dead now buried and an official mourning period over, officials said a special committee had been formed to oversee plans for the rebuilding of the south-eastern city and its ancient citadel.
"They have given themselves one month to come up with that plan," said Jesper Lund, a United Nations official in charge of the international relief effort.
Half the reconstruction cost, at the moment estimated to total at least 4,000 billion rials (400 million euros, 500 million dollars), would come from "external sources", Lund explained.
But Iranian authorities appeared undecided over whether the city should be put up again on the same site, with fears over its stability compounded by the dozens of powerful aftershocks that have hit the area since the December 26 devastation.
Minds were also focused on the political dimension of the quake: arch-enemy Washington's sending of aid supplies and relief teams as well as the offer to follow up by flying over a top-level delegation.
"The time for such a visit has not yet come," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters in Tehran.
The United States approached Tehran after the quake about the possibility of sending a delegation headed by top Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole and also suggested that a member of President George W. Bush's family might accompany her.
Had the mission gone ahead, it would have been the first public official US visit to the Islamic nation since a 1979-1981 crisis, when 52 Americans were held hostage in Iran for 444 days and the two countries broke diplomatic ties.
In the wake of the quake, the United States also eased sanctions on Iran in a gesture welcomed by powerful former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi.
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