Nil NSDate when trying to get date from UTC string in zulu time

Writing an iPhone app in Objective-C, I have a date in string form (in UTC format, with a Z on the end to denote zero UTC offset, or zulu time), which I need to parse into an NSDate object.

A bit of code:

NSDateFormatter* df = [[NSDateFormatter alloc]init];
[df setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ"];
NSString* str = @"2009-08-11T06:00:00.000Z";
NSDate* date = [df dateFromString:str];

Running this through the debugger, date ends up nil! I'm assuming it has something to do with my date format string.

How can I fix it to correctly parse the date string?

A thought would be to make the Z in the date format literal, a la setting the date format to yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSS'Z'.

That would work, except when the Z is parsed as a literal, the date loses offset information, and so is ambiguous, and therefore interpreted to be local time.

For example, if the string to parse was 2009-08-11T06:00:00.000Z (6:00 zulu time) it would be interpreted as 6:00 local time, and an incorrect offset would then be applied. It would then be parsed as 2009-08-11T06:00:00.000-600 (12:00 zulu time) with the offset depending on the user's offset.

Thanks!