6, April 2005	Wednesday	26 Safar 1426

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)

PARIS, April 5: Visiting Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said here on Tuesday he expected “significant” headway at a meeting of Iranian and European negotiators on his country’s controversial nuclear programme late this month. “I think we have made positive steps. Iran has proposed a global plan to settle this issue,” Mr Khatami told a press conference following 90 minutes of talks with his French counterpart Jacques Chirac at the Elysee palace.

“The European reaction, particularly that of France, has been very open”.

“I hope that during the next meeting on April 29, thanks to French support but also to the reception given to this global plan, we will be able to make even more significant headway,” he noted. “We are today closer to a solution than some time ago”.

Talks remain deadlocked over Iran’s insistence that it maintain the right to make its own nuclear fuel. There are widespread fears that the technology could be used to produce highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.

The European Union is currently considering, ahead of a meeting next week with Iranian negotiators in Geneva, a proposal by Tehran to allow it to produce low enriched uranium, and on a small scale.

The meeting in Geneva will be of experts from the two sides, while the meeting on April 29, which could be in London, will be at a higher level of foreign ministry political directors to review progress in the EU-Iran talks, which began in December, diplomats said.

Iran made the proposal to be allowed to run a pilot centrifuge project for uranium enrichment at a meeting in Paris last month with EU negotiators Britain, France and Germany, according to a European official who asked not to be named.

Earlier Mr Khatami told the French daily Le Figaro that his country could not agree to give up the peaceful use of atomic power.—AFP