Tehran, July 17 (DPA) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has appointed the former envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali-Akbar Salehi, as the new head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, Fars news agency said Friday.

Salehi will succeed Gholam-Reza Aqazadeh who resigned from the post recently.

In his new post, the US-trained scientist will be responsible for all technical aspects of his country's contentious nuclear programme.

The soft-spoken official was posted in Vienna in 2003 when the IAEA started its probe of Iran's nuclear activities, which had been kept secret for 18 years.

'I find him a man of dialogue,' the IAEA's former chief nuclear inspector Pierre Goldschmidt told DPA from Belgium.

Both men worked in Vienna when Iran agreed to a protocol allowing more extensive IAEA inspections in late 2003, and to suspending some of its nuclear activities, as Western countries had demanded.