Lausanne : US Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif began their first meeting of a fresh round of talks over Iran’s long disputed nuclear programme here Monday morning.
They were joined by Ali Akbar Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, and US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who had met earlier on Sunday to discuss the technical issues, Xinhua news agency reported.
A source close to the Iranian team said that Zarif would fly to Brussels to talk with his counterparts from Germany, France and Britain on Monday afternoon and then return to Lausanne for further talks with Kerry.
The top Iranian diplomat said en route to Lausanne earlier on Sunday that if there was political will, making a deal would be possible.
“If the other side’s political will is like ours, a deal would not be out of mind,” Zarif was quoted as saying.
Kerry also said that he hoped “in the next days” it would be possible to reach an interim deal with Iran if Tehran could show that its nuclear programme was for peaceful purposes only.
“If it’s peaceful, let’s get it done. And my hope is that in the next few days that will be possible,” he said in Egypt before heading to Switzerland.
The last round of Iran nuclear talks was held at the beginning of this month in Switzerland’s lakeside resort town of Montreux in which both Kerry and Zarif participated.
“We will return to these talks on March 15, recognising that time is of the essence, the days are ticking by,” Kerry said when leaving Montreux.
Along with the bilateral nuclear talks between the US and Iran, the talks with the P5+1 group of world powers over Iran’s nuclear programme will also resume this week, during which representatives from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany will hold negotiations with Iran.
The six world powers had set a June 30 deadline to forge a final and comprehensive agreement, but the US said earlier that it hoped to reach a “framework agreement” by the end of March.
It has been over a year since Iran and the world’s major countries agreed to come back to the negotiating table for talks on the Iranian nuclear programme in 2013.
Under an interim deal between Iran and the P5+1 group inked in November, 2013, Iran said it would suspend critical nuclear activities in return for limited ease of sanctions, with all sides seeking a final and comprehensive deal.
After missing two self-imposed deadlines, the negotiators agreed in November 2014 to extend the deadline for seven more months, hoping to reach a deal which could be one of the most important international agreements in decades.