Dubai: Just days away from a European deadline, Iran said Friday its foreign minister would hold a telephone conference call with his French, German and British counterparts to avoid the reimposition of United Nations sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
The call, planned for Friday by Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, according to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency, comes as the three parties to Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal threaten to reimpose those sanctions under a mechanism known as “snapback” in the accord.
The European Union’s chief diplomat will also join the call, IRNA said. The Europeans’ concern over the Iranian programme, which had been enriching uranium to near weapons-grade levels before the 12-day Iran-Israel war in June saw its atomic sites bombed, has only grown since Tehran cut off all cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in the conflict’s wake. That has left the international community further blinded to Iran’s programme — as well as the status of its stockpile of uranium enriched to 60% purity, a short, technical step to weapons-grade levels of 90 per cent.
Iran has long insisted its programme is peaceful, though it is the only non-nuclear-armed nation enriching uranium at that level. agencies