(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-04-08 09:31

WASHINGTON - The five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany plan to meet in April to discuss whether to sweeten incentives they have offered Iran to curb its nuclear program, US officials said on Monday.

The officials said the talks among senior diplomats from Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany would likely be held in mid-April in China, possibly in Shanghai, although the date and venue had yet to be fixed.

The Security Council has imposed three rounds of sanctions on Iran for defying council demands that it suspend its uranium enrichment program, which could be used to make fuel for power plants or atomic weapons.

Iran has refused to buckle to the sanctions and has spurned previous offers of economic benefits to suspend its uranium enrichment, which it says is to produce fuel for electrical power plants rather than for nuclear weapons.

US acting Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Dan Fried, the third-ranking US diplomat, plans to represent the United States at the meeting, the State Department said, declining to specify the venue or precise date.

In June 2006, the six countries held out incentives to Iran, including civil nuclear cooperation and wider trade in civil aircraft, energy, high technology and agriculture, if Tehran suspended uranium enrichment and negotiated with the six.

A senior US official made clear the Bush administration's skepticism about improving on the offer but said it would hear out the others in P5+1 who wished to do so.

"We think that the June 1, 2006, offer was generous and was reasonable but other countries have differing views and the nature of multilateral diplomacy is we have to listen to them as well," said the official, who spoke on condition he not be identified because of the sensitivity of the diplomacy.

Asked why Iran might respond to an improved package when it brushed off the 2006 offer as well as an earlier package of incentives from Britain, France, Germany and the United States in 2005, this official replied, "That's a good question."

"We'll see what some of the other countries think might bring the Iranians further along but, the Iranians have had almost two years to look at (the 2006 proposal) and propose some suggestions of their own and they haven't," he said.

"We are willing, within the boundaries of what is acceptable to us, to consider an elucidation of the incentive track ... but I am not aware of anything dramatically new," said another US official who asked not to be named.

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