TEHRAN, May 29: Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana will meet on Thursday in Spain in their latest bid to break the deadlock over the Iranian atomic standoff.

“Ali Larijani and Javier Solana will meet and talk on May 31 in Madrid,” a source in Iran’s supreme national security council told the state-run IRNA agency.

Solana had earlier confirmed at the eighth Asia-Europe meeting in Hamburg that he will hold talks on Thursday in the Spanish capital with Larijani, the head of Iran’s national security council.

The meetings between Larijani and Solana are central to diplomatic efforts to resolve the standoff, due to which two UN sanctions to suspend uranium enrichment have already been imposed on Iran.

The Madrid talks will be their second encounter in just over a month after a previous meeting in Ankara. Larijani and Solana are seeking to see if there is scope for opening full negotiations to break the deadlock.

The talks in Ankara from April 25-26 were “positive in form but not fruitful in substance,” Solana’s spokeswoman said.—AFP