VIENNA, July 6: Iran expects the United Nations to hold off on new sanctions while Tehran pursues new talks with the UN atomic agency about its disputed nuclear work, a senior Iranian official said on Friday.

“Of course this is definitely the expectation because otherwise, as I've said, this positive, constructive environment will be in jeopardy and this whole peace might collapse,” Iranian ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh said in an interview.

The International Atomic Energy Agency's deputy director general for safeguards Olli Heinonen will visit Tehran next week to draw up a plan to resolve “outstanding issues” in an over four-year-old IAEA investigation of Iran’s nuclear programme, Soltanieh said.

This comes with Iran defying UN Security Council resolutions for it to suspend uranium enrichment and to cooperate fully with the IAEA, which has unresolved questions about Iranian nuclear activities—AFP