Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the UN's nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna, Austria, will visit Iran next week to conduct talks on the country's nuclear program, his agency announced on Friday.
ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, is to meet with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, and other senior Iranian officials during what is expected to be a two-day visit, a senior agency official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The official added that ElBaradei would raise "outstanding safeguard verification issues and other confidence-building measures" requested by the 35-country board of the monitor, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Agency inspectors arrived in Tehran on Friday to visit the country's various nuclear sites before the trip.
In a nonbinding statement on March 29, the UN Security Council called for Iran to freeze all of its uranium enrichment-related activities within 30 days, as demanded by the nuclear agency's board.
But Iran has consistently re-jected such a move, saying its uranium-enrichment activities were solely for peaceful research purposes, not a step toward building a nuclear weapon, as the US and a number of other countries contend.
At a news conference in Madrid on Thursday, ElBaradei said: "There are still a number of outstanding issues in Iran that we need to clarify. The picture is not very clear; the picture is hazy." He added, "We have seen issues that we need to understand, before we can say we are satisfied that all activities in Iran are exclusively for peaceful purposes."
ElBaradei must report on Iran's progress to comply with international demands to both his agency's board and to the Security Council at the end of this month.
"This visit will provide Iran an opportunity in advance of that report to come forward with information required by the IAEA to fill in the gaps in the history of Iran's nuclear activities," the agency official said. "He is not going there to negotiate any settlement. His going there is a part of an ongoing verification process, and this requires face-to-face contact."
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