Iran Confirms Friday Talks with IAEA

"The new round of talks between Iran and the IAEA will be held at Iran's (IAEA) representative office in Vienna," Soltaniyeh told FNA on Wednesday.

He reiterated that the new round of talks will be held on Friday.

Iran and the IAEA held the latest round of talks in Vienna, Austria, in June.

Soltaniyeh and the agency's Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Safeguards Herman Nackaerts attended the talks.

Soltaniyeh, who held an 8-hour meeting with the agency's deputy director-general at that time, described the talks as "intensive", and announced that the two sides agreed to continue their negotiations in future.

The UN nuclear watchdog agency chief, Yukiya Amano, was in Tehran two months ago and the continued talks between Iran and the IAEA signifies progress in the talks between the two sides.

Amano said after his visit to Tehran that he expected a framework cooperation deal to be signed soon with Iran. The main bone of contention in the talks between Iran and the IAEA in June was a non-nuclear military site near Tehran that the UN agency wanted to visit for a third time.

After western intelligence agencies alleged that they had stolen a laptop computer from Iran which contains studies about military nuclear activities in Parchin military site - and although they refrained from presenting the original documents to Iran - Tehran allowed IAEA inspectors to visit the site twice and the IAEA team, led by the then deputy Director General Ollie Heinonen, eventually declared that the alleged studies in Parchin had been all baseless and unfounded.

Parchin was only one of the several problems in the relations between Iran and the IAEA which were all resolved even before Amano took the lead in the UN nuclear watchdog agency.

Before Amano came to power, his predecessor Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that all misunderstandings and ambiguities about Iran's nuclear activities had been removed.

A 2008 report of the IAEA by the then Director-General, Mohamed ElBaradei, thanked Iran's honest cooperation in removing ambiguities about its past activities and confirmed that Iran has answered all the six outstanding questions of the world body about the nuclear material and activities that it had had in the past.

Iran came clean of IAEA's questions and suspicions about its past nuclear activities at the end of an action plan which was endorsed by the IAEA and Iran in 2008, and Tehran said it considers its nuclear case closed after the then IAEA chief endorsed that all misunderstandings had been resolved.

But the new director general in his first report after ascending to power challenged Iran's nuclear activities, while many even in the West believed that the report carried a US tone and wording on an IAEA paper.

Tehran is now asking why it should allow the UN inspectors to visit this non-nuclear military site a third time on the basis of the same allegations which were announced baseless by the former IAEA chief.

Tehran has always asked the IAEA and the western countries to drop political allegations against Iran's nuclear program and deal with Tehran's dossier from technical and legal perspectives.
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