The EU is preparing a bold offer for Iran, including possible security guarantees, to persuade Tehran to curb its atomic ambitions, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said yesterday.
"It will be a generous package, a bold package, that will contain issues relating to nuclear, economic matters, and maybe, if necessary, security matters," Solana said, arriving for a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
"We are preparing a package [so] that it will be difficult for them to say no if what they really want is energy," he said, ahead of talks between the so-called EU-3 diplomatic powers; Britain, France and Germany.
Solana played down comments by Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, rejecting any new EU offer that might demand that the Islamic republic halt uranium enrichment activities.
The EU's top diplomat said the Iranians had yet to see the union's offer.
The West fears that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon behind the screen of a civilian atomic energy program. Tehran says it only wants to generate energy.
The US is seeking sanctions from the UN Security Council but it has failed to win support for the move and has given its European allies "a couple of weeks" to draft a fresh approach.
The EU, whose package must also satisfy Russia and China, has until this Friday -- when negotiators from the Security Council's five permanent members plus Germany meet in London -- to complete its work.
"Any offer which requires us to halt our peaceful nuclear activities will be invalid," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying on Sunday by the state news agency IRNA.
"I am surprised that a group of people hold meetings without us being present there and make decisions for us," he said.
As a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has the right to build a civilian nuclear program, but it must submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN watchdog.
It has refused to fully cooperate with the agency and Ahmadinejad has pledged to forge ahead as international pressure to give up enrichment has increased.
"This is one of the last chances to resolve this conflict from a diplomatic point of view," Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn told reporters.
"We are ready to cooperate in the civilian nuclear domain and in trade and political areas," he said, before the meeting with his EU counterparts started.
"I think the Iranians are going to understand that the Europeans are courageous and are proposing something very important," he said.
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ¥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000