DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - U.S.A./IRAN: THE UNITED STATES IS WILLING TO JOIN IN DIRECT TALKS WITH IRAN PROVIDING THEY STOP 'NUCLEAR ENRICHMENT'

U.S. envoy says America ready to talk to Iran — if it suspends enrichment

VIENNA, Austria: Washington remains interested in joining any direct nuclear talks with Iran if it heeds U.N. Security Council demands, a U.S. envoy said Tuesday, even as Tehran warned that America will regret detaining five Iranian officials in Iraq.

Gregory L. Schulte, the chief U.S. delegate to the International Atomic Energy Organization, spoke outside a 35-nation board meeting focusing on Iran's nuclear defiance of the council and against a backdrop of heightened anti-U.S. rhetoric coming out of Tehran over the detentions.
The U.S. military has said the five Iranians held in Iraq since January are suspected of links to a network supplying arms to insurgents — an accusation that Iran has denied.

Iran claims the men were diplomats and that the building U.S. troops occupied was a government liaison office. It also says the five were guests of the Iraqi government, and has demanded their release. Iraqi government officials have also called for their release, along with compensation for damages.

"We will make the Americans regret their ugly and illegal act," Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was quoted by Tehran's official IRNA news agency as saying. He did not elaborate.

However, Mottaki added that Iran was still willing to continue direct talks with the United States on Iraq, which began last month in Baghdad, breaking a 27-year diplomatic freeze between the two foes.

And in Vienna, Schulte said if Iran obeyed the U.N. Security Council by suspending its enrichment activities and its work on a reactor that will produce plutonium, Washington also was ready to talk with Iran about its nuclear program in a multilateral framework.

That offer first was made last year by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as part of attempts by the United States and five other world powers to persuade Iran to suspend enrichment activities in return for talks on a package of political and economic incentives.

"She's ready to go to the table with our partners from Russia, China and Europe," Schulte told Associated Press Television News. "All the Iranians have to do is ... suspend ... uranium enrichment (and) plutonium production that aren't necessary for civil purposes but are necessary if you want to build the bomb."

If Tehran remains intransigent, however, "I think my colleagues in New York are going to be working on a third set of sanctions give them additional impetus," he said, alluding to the Security Council.

The prospect of council action appeared more likely after senior Iranian envoy abruptly canceled talks Monday with the head of the IAEA, dashing hopes that the country is ready to end its secrecy about past suspicious nuclear activities.

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1) U.S. envoy says America ready to talk to Iran — if it suspends enrichment