TEHRAN - Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog will hold new talks today over Tehran’s long-running nuclear standoff with the West.

The meeting would be the third since March 3, when the UN Security Council issued a third resolution imposing sanctions on the Islamic Republic for refusing to freeze its uranium enrichment program, which Iran says has civilian applications.
“The IAEA delegation headed by Herman Nackaerts, the director for safeguards operations, starts its technical and specialist talks with Iranian experts on Monday,” Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, said.
Soltanieh will head the negotiations in Tehran, which are likely to last three days.
In April Iran and the IAEA held two rounds of talks which Soltanieh called “absolutely technical and apolitical.”
The meetings focused on the agency’s questions about Iran’s nuclear activities ahead of IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei’s report to the Board of Governors in May, he added.