Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) — U.S. and European diplomats resume a second round of talks with Iran today, seeking to shift the focus to the Persian Gulf nation’s nuclear program instead of the death of one of its scientist during a bombing.
Iran used yesterday’s meeting in Geneva with the so-called P5+1 — China, France, Russia, the U.S., the U.K. and Germany — to talk about the Nov. 29 bombing in Tehran that killed an Iranian nuclear scientist. Iran has blamed foreign agents for the bombing.
“It’s difficult to see how to get out of this spiral,” Ivan Oelrich, senior fellow at the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, said in a telephone call from New Orleans. “They have good reason to be suspicious of our intentions.”
The two-day meeting is the latest bid to avert a clash with Iran, holder of the world’s second-biggest oil and natural gas reserves, over its nuclear program. Instead, Iran’s envoy to the Geneva talks, Saeed Jalili, opened the session by condemning the killing of physicist Majid Shahriari, state-run Mehr news agency reported, citing an unidentified Iranian official in Geneva.
