Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini Friday urged Iran to act on its apparent willingness to resume negotiations on its nuclear programme with Western powers threatening to impose more sanctions.
"We would like the messages from Iran regarding the nuclear issue, those which say it wants to resume negotiations, to turn into concrete actions," said Frattini, according to Italian media.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week raised hopes of progress in the international stand-off over its nuclear activities by indicating that he might be ready to accept an offer to send some uranium abroad for enrichment.
Doing so would help ease fears that Iran is seeking to arm itself with nuclear weapons, but Washington called on Tehran to make a concrete offer to the UN watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"If Iran really wants to negotiate, we would welcome that action. If the objective however is only to waste time, it will be up to the (UN) Security Council to respond," he said, alluding to calls led by the United States for more sanctions.
Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi during a recent trip to Israel also expressed his country's opposition to the Tehran regime, suspected of developing an atomic bomb.
Tehran says its nuclear programme is strictly for civilian purposes and state television in Iran denounced Berlusconi's comments as being manipulated by Israel.
Enrichment outside of Iran is a central proposition of a UN-brokered deal the United States and other Western nations are pushing for out of fears that unsupervised enrichment could support a covert nuclear weapons programme.
Enriched uranium produces fuel for a nuclear reactor but the process can also be used to make the fissile core of an atomic bomb.
Iran's nuclear ambitions are a top issue at the Munich Security Conference which opened on Friday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would stress the international community's concerns over Tehran's nuclear programme in talks with his Iranian counterpart on the sidelines of the conference.
Share This Article With Planet Earth
