Istanbul to host Iran nuclear talks

Istanbul will host the next round of nuclear talks between Iran and world powers, Iran's English-language Press TV reported on Sunday, citing unnamed sources.

Iran's Fars news agency said the parties in the talks had also agreed to hold a second round of talks in the Iraqi capital Baghdad if they made progress in Turkey. There was no immediate comment from the world powers - the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany.

Iran and officials from the P5+1 group of countries had earlier released conflicting statements about the venue for the talks, scheduled on Friday, raising doubts among some diplomats and analysts over whether the negotiations would happen at all.

Meanwhile, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stressed to visiting former Japanese premier Yukio Hatoyama on Sunday that Teheran opposes nuclear weapons, his official website reported.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran is fundamentally opposed to the atomic bomb and weapons of mass destruction," Ahmadinejad told Hatoyama.

"Iran and Japan can exert a common effort to create a world without atomic weapons ... Difficult but humanitarian efforts will win in the end."

Japan is the only country ever to have suffered a nuclear attack, its cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki being targeted by the United States at the end of World War II.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of Iran's parliamentary committee for national security and foreign policy, warned Western powers that they would soon have to accept the reality of the country's nuclear advances, Iran's state news agency reported late on Saturday.

Boroujerdi was speaking at a ceremony in Mashhad, Iran, in memory of what Iran describes as its nuclear martyrs; at least four scientists associated with the country's nuclear program have been assassinated since 2010 and a fifth was wounded in a bomb attack.

Western countries suspect Teheran is covertly developing a nuclear weapons program, an accusation Iran has repeatedly denied.

Boroujerdi said the P5+1 group of countries needed to change their policy because "confronting the Islamic Republic will not be to their benefit", the IRNA news agency quoted him as saying.

Israel has signaled that it would accept, as a first priority, world powers focusing on persuading Iran to stop higher-level uranium enrichment when they resume stalled nuclear negotiations next week with Teheran.

Israel, which has threatened last-resort attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities if diplomacy fails, demanded last month that any negotiated resolution should end all uranium enrichment, high and low level, and remove all fuel already stockpiled by Iran.

But Western diplomats have said the world powers would first tackle Iran's uranium refinement to a fissionable concentration of 20 percent rather than its more abundant 3.5 percent-pure fuel.

The 20 percent enriched uranium would be far easier to enrich to bomb-grade 90 percent purity, though Iran denies having such designs, saying it is only seeking electrical energy and medical isotopes.

Reuters-Xinhua