Iran to resume nuclear talks in September: Ahmadinejad

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran was ready to resume long-stalled nuclear talks with world powers in September.


Afp July 27, 2010

TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran was ready to resume long-stalled nuclear talks with world powers in September, the Islamic republic's English-language Press TV reported on Tuesday.

"Iran will resume nuclear talks with the West in September," the channel quoted the hardliner as saying. But Ahmadinejad added that "Iran wants Turkey and Brazil to participate in the negotiations."

Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki had said this month that talks over Tehran's overall nuclear programme could begin in September after EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton reached out to Iran in a letter in June.

The Iranian president's comments came after the European Union slapped fresh sanctions on Iran's key energy sector on Monday in a bid to halt its sensitive uranium enrichment programme.

Canada followed suit, and the United States, which has led international efforts to curb Iran's atomic drive, said the punitive steps would bite. Brazil and Turkey, which refused to back new sanctions against Iran in the UN Security Council, drew up a nuclear fuel swap deal with Tehran to ship half of its low-enriched uranium abroad for an exchange with reactor fuel.

Western powers fear Tehran wants to build a nuclear bomb, a charge the Islamic republic denies. Ahmadinejad announced on June 28 that he was freezing nuclear talks for two months in retaliation for a fourth set of sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council three weeks earlier.

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