UN 'regrets' Ahmadinejad speech

Ban Ki-moon had met Iran's president before the speech

UN chief Ban Ki-moon has said Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "misused" an anti-racism conference at which he called Israel a racist state.

His speech sparked wide condemnation and a walkout by EU delegates.

Iran criticised Mr Ban's comments as "one-sided". Mr Ahmadinejad returned home on Tuesday to what was officially described as a "sensational" welcome.

The UN said Mr Ahmadinejad had dropped language from his speech describing the Holocaust as "ambiguous and dubious".

'Very regretful'

The original text of the speech said that after World War II, Western nations had "resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless, on the pretext of Jewish sufferings and the ambiguous and dubious question of Holocaust".

But UN officials said the Iranian president had dropped the terms "ambiguous and dubious", speaking instead of "the abuse of the question of the Holocaust".

Nevertheless, during a trip to Malta on Tuesday, Mr Ban said it was "very regretful that the conference was misused by the Iranian president for political purposes".

"Before the speech I had a long bilateral meeting with President Ahmadinejad and urged him to give a balanced and constructive contribution to the conference because he was the only head of state present," he was quoted as saying by Reuters news agency.

Mr Ahmadinejad spoke on Monday at the start of the five-day UN conference in Geneva.

Jewish migrants, he said, had been sent from Europe and the US after World War II "in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine".