Iran’s President to appoint negotiators as first step to resume nuclear program talks

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will appoint the negotiating team members and its head as the first step towards the resumption of negotiations with the international “sextet” of mediators on the Iranian nuclear program, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Araghchi stated on Tuesday. The next step, he added, will be fixing the date for a new meeting. Araghchi left open the possibility that not the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, as it was under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but some of the Foreign Ministry officials may become the chief negotiator. “The ministry has all the possibilities for this and it is quite capable of successful conducting and completing the work,” the ISNA news agency quotes Araghchi. Earlier, Iran’s new Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who himself had been a member of the negotiating team led by current President Rouhani, said that Tehran is “interested not in the negotiating process in itself, but in its successful completion, which would meet the interests of all parties.”