Iraqi Vice-President Adel Abdel Mahdi has met Iran’s top nuclear negotiator in Tehran in a bid to help mediate an end to Iran’s nuclear crisis, a source close to the Iraqi leader said on Saturday.
He said the meeting with Ali Larijani took place on Friday, a day after Abdel Hadi met in Baghdad with the ambassadors of Britain, France and Germany, whose countries have been at the centre of efforts to resolve the crisis.
”The Iraqi vice-president met on Friday, immediately after his arrival, with Ali Larijani for more than three hours for talks mainly on the Iranian nuclear case,” he said.
”He is attempting a mediation on the nuclear issue,” the source said. ”The Iraqi vice-president is to meet with other Iranian officials.”
Iran on Friday insisted it would not stop enriching uranium as world leaders warned the Islamic republic to halt the sensitive nuclear activity within weeks or face the consequences.
Iran considers uranium enrichment to be its right under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But Western powers, which suspect Iran’s nuclear programme has military ambitions, want it to suspend the practice.
In mid-March, Iran announced it had agreed to open talks with the United States on the situation in Iraq, at the request of the Iraqi authorities. But the discussions never took place.
Ties between Iran and Iraq, which fought a 1980-to-1988 war, have improved dramatically since Saddam Hussein’s fall and the rise to power of Iraq’s long-disenfranchised Shi’ite majority.
Many of Iraq’s current Shi’ite leaders once sought refuge in Iran, which opposed the US-led invasion of 2003 that toppled Saddam.
On May 26 during a visit to Baghdad by Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, his Iraqi counterpart Hoshyar Zebari said that ”Iraq will never again be a threat to Iran”.
But he also asked that Iraq’s neighbours not take advantage of Baghdad’s current difficulties by interfering in its affairs.
Iran, which has been given a package of incentives by European countries to stop its controversial uranium enrichment, has repeatedly said it will not comply with the request.
A senior cleric close to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Friday that Tehran would not suspend uranium enrichment, amid reports from the United Nations nuclear watchdog that it had accelerated enrichment work.
”We must have uranium enrichment between 3,5% to 5 % and they have to accept it,” Ayatollah Ahmad Janati said.
US President George Bush, meanwhile, said Tehran had ”weeks and not months” to accept the offer and that the UN Security Council would act if Iran did not comply.
In spite of the West’s insistence that Tehran suspend enrichment, Iran has announced it is set to expand its enrichment facilities from the current 164 centrifuge devices to a 3 000-centrifuge cascade in its Natanz plant. — AFP
