Iran: National Security Official to visit EU to discuss latest breaches

Iran Focus: Iran will be sending its chief national security official, Hassan Rowhani to The Hague on Monday. The Netherlands is  the current holder of the rotating EU Presidency.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters in Tehran today: “At present we are conducting very sensitive discussions with the Europeans.” He added that Rowhani will conduct a series of talks with Dutch officials. Iran Focus

Paris, Sep. 5 – Iran will be sending its chief national security official, Hassan Rowhani to The Hague on Monday. The Netherlands is the current holder of the rotating EU Presidency.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters in Tehran today: “At present we are conducting very sensitive discussions with the Europeans.” He added that Rowhani will conduct a series of talks with Dutch officials.

For the past two days, European foreign ministers have been meeting in Maastricht to discuss Iran’s failure to cooperate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog. Iran had been hiding a clandestine nuclear program for the past 18 years until it was exposed in August 2004 by the opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran.

Tehran is currently under scrutiny by both the United States as well as Europe following a report by the IAEA condemning its noncompliance in many instances. This week, Colin Powell confirmed that the U.S. was looking to refer Iran to the UN Security Council for Iran’s breaches of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot told reporters: “We agreed upon the need to send out a strong signal to Iran to cooperate with the IAEA.” Both the British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the his German counterpart Joschka Fischer have said in the past few days that they are very ‘disappointed’ with the regime’s nuclear activities.

Yesterday in an interview with the Associated Press news agency the Iranian regime for the first time admitted to having developed the technology to be able to extract its own uranium from deep under its central desert, about 300 miles south of Tehran, by 2006.

The IAEA, whose recent report stated that Iran plans to enrich more than 30 tones of uranium, will discuss its latest findings on Iran’s nuclear activities in a meeting of its governing board in Vienna on Sep. 13.