| Window for N-talks ‘closing’: US |
TEL AVIV/ VIENNA The window for dialogue over Iran’s nuclear programme is closing, the US ambassador to Israel said on Wednesday, insisting that Washington is under no illusions about Teheran’s agenda in the talks even as UN nuclear inspectors displayed new satellite imagery indicating that some small buildings had been dismantled and other possible clean-up work undertaken at an Iranian military site they want to visit.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he did not expect talks in June with six world powers in Moscow over Iran’s nuclear powers to yield any major breakthroughs.
Ambassador Dan Shapiro said: “We don’t intend on continuing talks for talks’ sake. The window is closing,” he told participants attending an international security conference at the university.
Shapiro said there were “significant differences” at the Baghdad talks, but also “a narrow common ground,” which the parties would try to build on in the Russian capital.
And he said the threat of military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities was still open.
“As we apply all elements of American power to prevent a nuclear Iran, the United States takes no option off the table — that means a political component, a diplomatic component, an economic component and a military option,” he said.
One image shown by the UN nuclear inspectors from May 25 showed signs that ‘ground-scraping activities’ had taken place at the Parchin facility, as well as the presence of a bulldozer, according to diplomats who attended a closed-door briefing by UN nuclear agency officials.
This will likely further strengthen western suspicions that Iran is “sanitising” the site of any incriminating evidence before allowing the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) into the complex. “It is very clear,” one western envoy said.
Iran’s IAEA envoy Ali Asghar Soltanieh dismissed such accusations by western officials, telling reporters after the briefing that “this kind of noise and allegations are baseless”.
Agencies
|
 |
|
|
| NEWS UPDATES |
|
|
|
|
|
|
