IAEA and Iran open new round of talks on the nuclear issue

The UN nuclear watchdog held fresh talks with Iran Friday in Vienna, where it was expected to push for access to a suspected testing site near Tehran. The agency’s chief inspector Herman Nackaerts and deputy director general Rafael
Grossi were meeting Iran’s envoy to the agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, to try to get greater access to Tehran’s contested nuclear program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is especially interested in the Parchin military base near the Iranian capital, where it believes suspicious explosives testing was carried out before 2003 and possibly after that. Western
powers and Israel suspect Iran of trying to develop a bomb behind the veil of its civilian nuclear program, a charge denied by Tehran, which says it is developing civilian atomic power.

The agency says it was denied access to the Parchin site during two visits to Iran in January and February. In a report last month, the IAEA said new satellite imagery indicated “extensive activities” at the base, where it said
for years there had been virtually none. This included the razing of two small buildings and what looked like a water run-off, suggesting a clean-up, experts said.

On May 21, IAEA chief Yukiya Amano visited Iran after talks in Vienna. Afterwards, he noted that the two sides were close to a deal that would allow agency inspectors greater access to sites, people and documents tied to Iran’s
nuclear program.

 Earlier this week however, he hinted that a deal might still be some way off. “If we do not have access to the Parchin site or other people, information and sites, then…we cannot give assurance that all the activities in Iran
have peaceful purposes,” he added.

Soltanieh refused to comment on the talks Friday, when he arrived for the meeting at the United Nations headquarters in Vienna, though two days earlier he expressed optimism that a deal would be concluded. During talks in Beijing
Friday, China’s President Hu Jintao urged his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to cooperate with the IAEA, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Hu also called on Iran to be “flexible and pragmatic” ahead of talks with the so-called P5+1 world powers — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — in Moscow on June 18-19.

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Posted by Hamza Jahangir on Jun 8 2012. Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry