Iran ready to continue nuclear talks: FM

Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi says President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has once again expressed readiness for talks over Tehran’s nuclear energy program.

“The president of the Islamic Republic of Iran has once again announced Iran’s readiness to [resolve] our country’s nuclear issue through negotiations with the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany),” Salehi told reporters in the Iranian capital, Tehran, on Wednesday.

The senior Iranian official was referring to President Ahmadinejad’s remarks during a trilateral meeting with his Russian and Kazakh counterparts on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s summit in Kazakhstan’s capital city of Astana.

The Iranian minister also reiterated, “Iran has always had very good cooperation with the [International Atomic Energy] Agency” and this is the proof of the “peaceful” nature of its nuclear program.

Iran and the P5+1 held two rounds of multifaceted talks in Geneva in December 2010 and in the Turkish city of Istanbul last January.

Iran says that as a member of the IAEA and a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) it has a right to use the peaceful applications of nuclear energy for electricity generation and medical research.

The IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production.