Kerry, Zarif hold nuclear talks

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart on Sunday took a walk by Lake Geneva and then began intense talks here on Tehran’s nuclear programme to remove the “significant gaps” that remain ahead of a key deadline.

The bilateral talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif Zarif and Mr. Kerry have begun while the P5+1 — China, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., France and Germany — were to meet as a group later.

Ali Akbar Salehi, the director of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s brother and close aide Hossein Fereydoon along with U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz made their maiden appearance in the talks signalling that the deal is entering a sensitive stage. The two officials and their negotiators spent more than five hours on Saturday negotiating technical details of the nuclear talks.

The U.S. and Iranian diplomats along with negotiators from the P5+1 group have been meeting in Geneva since the last three days to smoothen out major bumps in reaching a nuclear deal.

The negotiations have mainly been over Iranian uranium enrichment and the pace of removing sanctions, which the U.S. wants to stagger over time.

The six nations are trying to broker a deal with Iran to end a more than a decade-long standoff over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme in return for an easing of sanctions.