AFP: Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Larijani will meet UN nuclear agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Friday, a day before his next meeting with the EU foreign policy chief, the state IRNA news agency reported on Wednesday.
TEHRAN, June 20, 2007 (AFP) – Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Larijani will meet UN nuclear agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Friday, a day before his next meeting with the EU foreign policy chief, the state IRNA news agency reported on Wednesday.
“This meeting will take place in Vienna on Friday,” Iran’s representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told IRNA.
Iran’s supreme national security council has announced that Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana would meet in Lisbon on Saturday, in their latest attempt to break the deadlock on the Iranian nuclear programme.
ElBaradei has called on Iran to declare a moratorium on expanding uranium enrichment operations in order to defuse the crisis over Western fears that Tehran seeks atomic weapons.
Larijani and Solana have been holding a series of talks aimed at resolving the crisis over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Iran has so far been slapped with two sets of UN Security Council sanctions and faces a third for its refusal to suspend sensitive enrichment work, the process which makes nuclear fuel and the fissile core of an atom bomb.
Oil-rich Iran insists it only wants to make nuclear fuel to meet its growing energy demands.
Solana and Larijani last met on May 31 in Madrid, but no breakthrough was reported.
