Iran to restart nuke talks with IAEA

Tehran, Jan 28 (ANI): Iran will restart talks with a team of the United Nation's nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in a bid to allay their suspicions of a covert weapons programme.

Diplomats familiar with the matter said that the IAEA team would seek assurances that they will be able to interview key Iranian scientists suspected of past involvement in weapons research, visit sensitive sites and see documents concerning the procurement of dual-use technology.

According to The Guardian, Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, recently said Tehran was ready to resume broader talks with the international community, broken off over a year ago.

But the office of Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief who coordinates a six-nation group handling negotiations over Iran's nuclear programme, said that Tehran had made no formal move towards restarting the dialogue.

Meanwhile, the IAEA team, led by the agency's chief inspector, Herman Nackaerts, and an assistant director general, Rafael Grossi, is seeking Iranian explanations for evidence, described as "credible" in an IAEA report in November, pointing to past experimentation on nuclear weapons design.

"We are not saying that Iran has one, two or three nuclear devices. We are saying that Iran has, at different stages of development, technology that is directly linked to the development of a nuclear device," Grossi, an Argentinian diplomat, told the Buenos Aires Herald.

According to the paper, nuclear talks between Iran and IAEA, the first such discussions in more than three years, represent the only diplomatic progress, as tensions mount over Iran's nuclear programme and western attempts to cut off the Islamic regime's oil trade.

The Iranian government denies it is seeking to make nuclear weapons, insisting its research is for scientific or civil power-generating purposes. (ANI)