Region

ANKARA — The network of a US-based cleric illegally tapped thousands of telephones in Turkey to blackmail and concoct criminal cases as part of a campaign of covert influence over government, a top adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.

A lawyer for preacher Fethullah Gulen, accused by Erdogan of building a parallel command structure in police and judiciary, described the accusations as unjust and contributing to an atmosphere of “hatred and enmity” in Turkish society.

The government accuses Gulen’s Hizmet (Service) network of engineering corruption charges against figures including businessmen close to Erdogan that came to light with a series of raids on December 17. The scandal has posed the biggest challenge yet to Erdogan’s 11-year-rule.

The government responded by reassigning thousands of police and hundreds of prosecutors and judges in a bid to purge the influence of Gulen, once an ally of Erdogan believed to have helped the prime minister rein in the power of the military.

Hizmet runs a large network of schools, businesses and media groups in Turkey and across the world. Tension with Erdogan came to light when the prime minister moved to close the schools, a primary source of Hizmet’s income and influence.

One of the prosecutors named in newspaper reports as being involved in wire tapping denied the accusation.

“There was definitely no monitoring or phone-tapping of thousands of politicians, writers, NGO representatives and businessmen in the framework of this dossier in the way that the newspaper stories say,” prosecutor Adem Ozcan said in a statement carried by news websites.

According to Star newspaper, Erdogan adviser Yalcin Akdogan and others including the interior minister, the national intelligence agency head and politicians from various parties were among those whose phones were tapped over three years.

“For years they listened to 7,000 people and were going to open a court case against them for being a member of an imaginary criminal organisation,” Akdogan told Reuters.

“Completely imaginary crimes are created, a scenario is created based on phone-tapping... If you listen to somebody for five years you can construct a crime with imaginary scenarios.”

“We are faced with a structure which listens to everybody illegally, follows everything concerning private life, using it when necessary as blackmail and fabricating crimes by people,” Akdogan said.

Other senior Turkish officials also described widespread illegal eavesdropping, including of Erdogan himself.

Gulen’s lawyer Nurullah Albayrak said in a statement there were “unjust” efforts to attribute the wire-tapping to his client, calling for the matter to be investigated and saying such media reports were designed to be exploited politically.

“This situation will serve no purpose other than to provoke further the hatred and enmity which is being created in society,” Albayrak said in a statement published by media outlets close to Gulen.

Star newspaper said two anti-terrorism prosecutors had obtained court orders authorising the phone-tapping as part of an investigation into the “Selam Terror Organisation”, a hitherto unheard of group whose name means “Greeting”.

Journalists, academicians, businessmen and senior members of various non-governmental organsations were among others whose phones were bugged, the paper said, publishing a full-page list of those targeted.

The Yeni Safak daily, also close to the government, said thousands of people including Erdogan were bugged.

Energy Minister Taner Yildiz, among those allegedly bugged, said he believed his phone was tapped for at least 2-1/2 years, describing such wire tapping as targetting all of Turkey and not just the AK Party.

“I believe this to be extremely wrong and a big insult to the Turkish state and the government,” he told reporters in Ankara. “This is no longer just the AK Party’s problem.”

Earlier this month, senior officials said Turkey was launching a criminal investigation into the alleged “parallel state”. A close ally of the cleric has accused the government of conducting a campaign of “incitements and lynchings”.

Parliament has passed laws tightening government control over the Internet and the courts. It has also drafted a law seeking powers for the national intelligence agency in what his opponents regard as an authoritarian backlash against the graft inquiry.

Gulen left Turkey and settled in the United States in the 1990s when a secularist establishment accused him of Islamist activities. He backed Erdogan’s rise to power in 2002, but the two men’s paths have diverged, Gulen criticising among other things his assertive policy on Israel and the United States.

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Ahead of a visit by Chancellor Angela Merkel, Germany’s foreign minister on Monday heaped tough criticism on Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank, calling the construction “disruptive” to peace efforts and saying it would be raised during two days of meetings with Israeli leaders.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier made the blunt remarks in Madrid before flying to Israel, where Merkel was to arrive late Monday with almost all of her Cabinet. The two countries hold a joint Cabinet meeting every year.

US-mediated peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians will be a main focus in meetings, and German opposition to settlement construction will be raised, Steinmeier said in a statement.

“We’ll discuss where things stand on the peace process and will try to find out what the obstacles are that prevent a solution,” he said. “The settlement policy clearly remains among those obstacles and this will of course be raised. We said clearly in the past that we don’t just consider decisions to expand settlements as unhelpful, but as disruptive of peace efforts, and of course we will discuss this during our visit,” he said.

Germany is Israel’s closest ally in Europe. Tensions have been on the rise lately between Israel and Europe, and also with Germany, over settlement policies.

CAIRO – The government of Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem al-Beblawi said on Monday it has resigned, ahead of a presidential poll which will likely bring army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to power.

Sisi, by far the country's most popular political figure, has not yet announced his candidacy for this spring's presidential election, but aides say he has already decided to run and will make the announcement soon.

The field marshal, who is the defence minister and first deputy prime minister in the outgoing cabinet, has to resign from the government and the army before he can officially announce his nomination.

Beblawi's government was appointed in July after Sisi ousted Islamist Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first elected and civilian president.

"The cabinet decided in light of the current situation that the country is going through... to submit its resignation to Adly Mansour, the interim president," the cabinet said in a statement.

Beblawi praised the government's performance on state television.

"For the past six to seven months, the government assumed its responsibilities and duties... the government did not spare any efforts to get Egypt out of a bad phase," Beblawi said in reference to security and economic issues.

"This is not the time for personal interests. The nation is above everybody."

Beblawi said the government had also completed the first step in a road map outlined by the military-installed authorities, by holding a referendum on a new constitution in January.

Government spokesman Hany Saleh told AFP that Monday's decision was taken because there was a "feeling that new blood is needed".

"Egypt is moving forward. This decision will not affect foreign relations or internal stability," he said, adding it was still unclear which ministers from the outgoing cabinet would keep their posts.

BEIRUT — Two suicide bombers killed a senior Al Qaeda operative on Sunday, blowing themselves up inside the militant leader’s compound in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, rebels and activists said.

The killing of Abu Khaled Al Suri, who rebels said was serving as Al Qaeda chief Ayman Al Zawahiri’s representative in Syria, falls against the backdrop of bloody rebel infighting between an Al Qaeda-breakaway group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), and an array of ultraconservative and more moderate opposition fighters.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for Sunday’s assassination, but rebels quickly accused the ISIL. Suri had been critical of the group, blaming it for the internecine conflict among rebels that has killed thousands of people across northern Syria since it began in early January.

Suri’s death could further complicate efforts to resolve those clashes, which have undermined rebel efforts to oust President Bashar Assad in Syria’s nearly three-year civil war. Since the rebel infighting began, government forces have chipped away at opposition-held areas, including around Aleppo.

A native Syrian with longstanding ties to Al Qaeda, Suri was a co-founder of Ahrar Al Sham, a prominent, hardline rebel group in Syria that is part of a powerful alliance of seven groups known as the Islamic Front.

Akram Al Halabi, a spokesman for the Islamic Front, described Suri as “a big figure in global jihad”, and said he was appointed by Zawahiri last year to mediate a dispute between the two Al Qaeda affiliates in Syria: the Islamic State and the Nusra Front.

Speaking via Skype, Halabi said Suri had been critical of the ISIL and its antagonistic approach towards other rebel factions. He said rebels believe the ISIL, which Al Qaeda publicly disowned earlier this month, was behind Sunday’s bombing.

“The first fingers of blame point to the State,” Halabi said. “Unfortunately this is going to make the infighting worse.”

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said two others were also killed in the attack, which it attributed to the ISIL. The observatory obtains its information from a network of activists on the ground.

Suri had long been on the radar of Western intelligence agencies. In 2002, Spanish officials described Suri, whose real name is Mohamed Bahaiah, as the courier for the late terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden between Afghanistan and Europe.

Islamic extremists have emerged as a powerful force in Syria’s civil war. The rise to prominence of hard-line Islamic militants like Suri has sent jitters through Western capitals, and dampened enthusiasm for the anti-Assad opposition.

DAMASCUS — Syria said Sunday it is ready to cooperate with a rare UN Security Council resolution to allow humanitarian access, so long as it respects “state sovereignty”.

A Saudi source, meanwhile, said Riyadh is in talks with Pakistan to provide anti-aircraft and anti-tank rockets to Syrian rebels to try to tip the balance in their war against the regime.

In Damascus, the foreign ministry said the “root causes” of the humanitarian crisis must be treated, singling out “foreign-backed terrorism” and sanctions placed on President Bashar Assad’s regime by Western and Arab countries.

The Security Council, which has been sharply divided over the nearly three-year Syrian conflict, unanimously adopted Resolution 2139 on Saturday, calling for humanitarian aid convoys to be allowed access across the war-torn country.

According to the ministry statement, carried by state news agency SANA, Syria is ready to cooperate with the UN mission and international humanitarian organisations “to agree on the implementation of Resolution 2139”.

It said the resolution must be implemented “with respect for the principles laid out in the UN Charter, international law and the basic foundations of humanitarian work, especially state sovereignty and the role of the state, and principles of neutrality, transparency and non-politicised assistance”.

Damascus said the resolution, which condemns terror attacks by Al Qaeda-linked organisations, was an “admission” by the Security Council of the presence of “extremist Al Qaeda-linked terrorism” in Syria.

It described the UN condemnation as “a step in the right direction”.

Since the March 2011 start of Syria’s uprising — which began as peaceful protests but escalated into a civil war after security forces repeatedly attacked demonstrators — Assad’s regime has blamed the violence on foreign-backed “terrorism”.

An estimated 140,000 people have been killed since the start of the uprising and millions more have been displaced.

‘Starvation weapon
of war’

Syria’s staunch ally Russia, with support from China, had blocked three previous resolutions aimed at pressuring the Damascus regime since March 2011.

But Moscow and Beijing, two of the five permanent Security Council members, did not do so this time, sending a strong message to Assad, whose government is accused of serious rights violations.

The Security Council resolution calls on “all parties to immediately lift the sieges of populated areas”.

An earlier draft of the resolution had threatened sanctions should Syria fail to comply, but Russia refused and distributed a draft of its own, which included the language on “fighting terrorism” in Syria.

The resolution is the second Security Council decision since Syria’s war began. It follows a decision ordering the destruction of Syria’s chemical arsenal, after an August 21, 2013 chemical attack near Damascus killed hundreds of people.

Nadim Houry, a Middle East deputy director of Human Rights Watch, said the resolution was “a political breakthrough but words will not feed Syrians in desperate need of food”.

Without the threat of sanctions, “it is up to Syria’s allies, particularly Russia and Iran, to ensure that the Syrian government gets the message, and stops using the starvation of civilians as a weapon of war,” he said.

Reflecting scepticism on the ground, an activist from Douma near the Syrian capital told AFP: “We would really like humanitarian corridors to become a reality. But I really doubt it, especially as the resolution doesn’t mention sanctions”.

On the international scene, a Saudi source said Riyadh was seeking Pakistani arms for the Syrian rebels it supports in the wake of the failure of Geneva peace talks earlier this month.

The source, requesting anonymity, pointed to a visit to Riyadh earlier this month by Pakistan’s army chief of staff, General Raheel Sharif, who met Crown Prince Salman Bin Abdul Aziz.

Pakistan manufactures shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, known as Anza, and anti-tank rockets — both of which Riyadh is trying to get for the rebels, said the source, who is close to Saudi decision makers.

In the latest violence, a car bomb explosion hit a hospital on Syria’s border with Turkey on Sunday, killing two people and wounding several more, a monitoring group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the blast struck close to Orient hospital near the rebel-held border town of Atmeh.

And a prominent rights lawyer, Anwar Bunni, said his brother Akram, a dissident writer and journalist, was arrested by the security forces in Damascus on Saturday.

BEIRUT — An Al Qaeda-linked group has claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing against Lebanese soldiers that killed at least three people, the latest attack linked to the war in neighbouring Syria.

The Nusra Front in Lebanon said in a statement on Twitter late Saturday that one of their followers blew himself up at an army checkpoint in the Shiite-dominated northeastern town of Hermel earlier in the day. The group said it was targeting the town in retaliation for the Shiite group Hizbollah fighting alongside troops of Syrian President Bashar Assad. The attack killed two soldiers and a civilian, and wounded another 18.

More than a dozen bombings have targeted mostly Shiite areas around Lebanon since July.

The attacks are mostly claimed by hard-line Sunni groups seeking revenge against Hizbollah for supporting Assad. The bulk of the casualties are usually civilians and the claims of responsibility usually name pro-Hizbollah neighbourhoods as the targets, as opposed to the group’s fighters or offices.

In a statement linked to the group’s Twitter page, the Nusra Front did not mention targeting soldiers in Hermel, but Lebanese extremist Sunni groups typically view the army as working in step with Hizbollah.

The terse statement referred to a “blessed martyrdom operation” and published three pictures of children, two boys and a girl, with amputated hands and legs under the headline “Crimes of the party of Iran [Hizbollah] in Syria”.

The Nusra Front in Lebanon appears inspired by an Al Qaeda-linked rebel brigade in Syria sharing the same name.

On February 1, a suicide attack at a gas station in Hermel killed at least three people. On Wednesday, two suicide bombers blew up their cars near an Iranian cultural centre in Beirut, killing at least eight people and wounding scores, including children in an orphanage.

Since December, troops have been on high alert searching suspicious cars for fear of more suicide attacks.

Lebanese soldiers have arrested about half a dozen people suspected in planning bombings around the country.

TIKRIT, Iraq — At least 17 people were killed and dozens wounded in bombings and shootings in northern Iraq and Baghdad on Sunday, police and medical sources said.

In the deadliest attack, gunmen killed three policemen and four detainees travelling in a police convoy near the northern city of Baiji.

The police had carried out 65 arrests in the town of Siniya, near Baiji, and was returning south to its base in Tikrit when gunmen ambushed them with a roadside bomb and sprayed gunfire, police said.

In Baghdad, a bomb exploded in a second-hand market for bicycles and motorcycles in the Shiite neighbourhood of Sadr City, killing five people and wounding 22, police and medical sources said.

In the eastern Baghdad neighbourhood of Waziriyah, at least four people were killed and 18 wounded when a bomb exploded on a busy street, police said.

Gunmen attacked a police checkpoint and killed one policeman near the mainly Sunni town of Tarmiya, north of Baghdad, police sources said.

Clashes and bombings have become a daily occurrence in Iraq as resurgent Sunni militants have launched a sustained campaign of suicide bombings.

The Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki has found itself locked in a battle with Sunni extremist and rebellious tribal groups in the western province of Anbar.

Members of the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant are holed up inside Fallujah along with Sunni fighters angry at Maliki over what they say are policies which discriminate against Iraq’s Sunni minority.

The Iraqi government declared a ceasefire over the weekend but clashes flared periodically on Sunday, according to residents in Fallujah.

The United Nations estimates that more than 370,000 people have been uprooted from their homes due to the fighting in Anbar.

DUBAI — The ink was barely dry on President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s plan to stabilise chaotic Yemen before the objections started pouring in.

Leader of a nation seemingly on the brink of breakdown for years, Hadi had hoped he could appease rival political groups by creating a federal state of six regions that would give each more say over political, social, economic and security affairs.

To date, few factions appear placated, a reality that bodes ill for a country already battling endemic poverty, poor governance, regional insurgencies and Al Qaeda militancy.

Restive southerners seeking autonomy, if not secession, fear the plan would weaken the south, partly by separating it from the sprawling Hadramout province, where some oil reserves lie.

Some northern Houthi rebels also have strong reservations because the proposal links the rugged mountain region they control to the Sanaa area and denies it an outlet to the sea.

Months of political haggling seem sure to follow. If those disputes turn violent, instability in Yemen, which lies near vital sea lanes as well as oil giant Saudi Arabia, will deepen.

Ravaged by multiple conflicts in the past half century, Yemen suffers food and water shortages, corruption, almost non-existent social services and security forces weakened by factional rifts. Regional conflicts and the prevalence of well-armed tribes mean much of Yemen is outside state control.

Forced to import most of its food because of a paucity of arable land in relation to its booming population, Yemen has child malnutrition rates among the highest in the world.

In the face of such towering problems, Hadi’s plan was meant to create the administrative structure at least to make a start on rebuilding the country. But consensus has proved elusive.

“The federal plan was never going to please everybody,” Britain’s ambassador to Yemen, Jane Marriott, told Reuters.

“There are lots of things that can go wrong. So far from what we’ve seen in Yemen, there are lots of people trying to make this work right. The biggest challenge is one of political will, there are still people out there who have their own agendas, who are not necessarily focused on the interests of Yemen,” she said by telephone from Sanaa.

Troubled transition

Ibrahim Sharqiyeh, a conflict resolution expert at the Doha-based Brookings Centre, said the disputes could be settled peacefully, but warned of “serious problems” if they were not.

The decision to carve out six regions, with the capital Sanaa given special status, comes at a sensitive time in Yemen’s efforts to escape from instability.

With the wider region increasingly split on sectarian lines by the war in Syria, internal strains make Yemen another front in a Middle Eastern “cold war” between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Becoming a federal state is part of Yemen’s planned transition to democracy under a US-backed power transfer deal that finally eased former president Ali Abdullah Saleh from office in 2012 after a year of mass protests against his rule.

A federal state would decentralise authority from Sanaa, diluting the power that Saleh had consolidated over his decades-long tenure, an era plagued by endemic corruption and conflict.

Each region would have more say over its own welfare — civil and social services, health and security. And each would have its own police force, while the army protects Yemen’s borders.

Southerners and Houthis — whose Zaidi sect is a distinct branch of Shi’ite Islam — do not necessarily oppose the idea of a federal state, but are unhappy with the proposed structure.

Drafting of the constitution, set to include broad outlines of the federal plan, is expected to start soon, paving the way for elections next year. But finding agreement will be hard.

Southern officials were among the first to raise objections to Hadi’s plan, which he approved earlier this month.

Among its defects was a failure to define “how exactly the federal entities would be built, staffed, and what the nature of relations between the core and periphery of the country would be”, Theodore Karasik, director of research and consultancy at the Gulf security and military think tank INEGMA, wrote in an online article.

Many southerners have long demanded the restoration of the state that merged with North Yemen in 1990.

Several separatist leaders walked out of protracted national reconciliation talks before they ended last month with an agreement to transform Yemen into a federal state, but left Hadi to decide whether to opt for two regions or six.

Violent response?

A committee headed by Hadi decided on a plan that envisions splitting the former South Yemen into two regions, Aden and Hadramout, and the more populous former North Yemen into four.

“We should not minimise the importance or significance of the rejection... To have both the Houthis and the southerners speaking against the proposed set-up, is a very serious challenge,” said Sharqiyeh.

“I don’t think this is going to kill the idea of federalism itself... I think it will derail the transition process.”

Ali Salim Al Beidh, the former president of South Yemen, who lives in Lebanon, rejected the proposal outright.

“The people of the south will continue their peaceful struggle... [and] have the ability to foil all these federalism plans,” he said in emailed remarks sent to Reuters via an aide.

Other Yemen-based southern officials have also rejected the plan and, according to Yemeni political scientist Abdulghani Iryani, a violent southern response cannot be ruled out.

“If they decide to challenge it by force, that would be very messy... the most radical faction of Ali Salim Al Beidh has often said they will resort to violence to reach their goals and the risk of that happening is quite credible,” he told Reuters.

Yemeni officials have signalled that the government is ready to adjust the borders of the six regions, but not to consolidate the south into one region instead of two.

While politicians bicker, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which seized some southern areas in 2011 before falling back in 2012, is pursuing attacks on security forces and oil facilities, posing a grave threat to the government and Western interests.

Marriott, whose country was the colonial power in Aden and the rest of the south until it won independence in 1967, said the hope was that the federal plan might diminish that threat.

“It’s central that the reach of the government of Yemen is extended and security is managed,” she said.

“This is never going to be a completely secure country but [the idea is] that the levels of insecurity are managed and the space in which Al Qaeda can operate disappears ultimately.”

‘Ink on paper’

The Houthis, who have waged an on-off revolt since 2004, are also unhappy with the federal plan, especially because it cuts their northern Saada region off from the Red Sea, analysts said.

“There should have been economic criteria that keep in mind an equitable distribution of resources and power,” said Houthi politician Ali Al Bakhiti. He said the deal had no legitimacy.

“It will fail in practical implementation. The authority will be forced, sooner or later, to change this situation. The government will not be able to force nationals to be a part of a region. It will remain ink on paper,” he said.

The plan puts Saada in the Azal region, of which Sanaa is a geographic part, though the capital will have a special status.

“By linking them, or keeping them a part of Sanaa, it makes autonomy impossible for them [the Houthis],” Sharqiyeh said.

Iryani said he did not expect the Houthis to obstruct the transition process, calling their objections “more of a bargaining position than any serious challenge to the deal”.

Abderrahim Sabir, a senior UN political adviser in Sanaa, says funding could prove the main obstacle to federalism.

“The biggest challenge for the federal system won’t be a political one, but mainly an economic one,” Sabir said.

“Because we’re talking about creating an entirely new political system. There will be new administrations in each region, regional elections for regional parliaments, regional governments, regional security services,” he said.

Marriott said Britain shared such concerns.

“Building up the state institutions is not going to happen overnight. We’re looking at a 10-year time horizon before we can judge whether this has succeeded, or failed or not,” she said.

“If we start judging whether it’s failed or succeeded every time a bomb goes off or in a six-month timescale, then we’re going to be doomed to judging the worst.”

CAIRO — Prosecutors Sunday accused deposed president Mohamed Morsi of leaking state secrets to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as part of a plot to destabilise Egypt, at the second hearing of his trial for espionage.

The trial, one of three that are under way against Morsi, is part of a relentless government crackdown targeting him and his Muslim Brotherhood movement since his ouster by the army in July.

Prosecutors accuse Morsi and 35 others, including leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, of conspiring with foreign powers, Palestinian movement Hamas and Shiite Iran to destabilise Egypt.

On Sunday, the second hearing since the trial opened on February 16, they detailed the charges against Morsi and his co-defendants.

They were specifically accused of “delivering to a foreign country... national defence secrets and providing the Iranian Revolutionary Guards with security reports in order to destabilise the security and stability of the country”.

The statement read in court did not identify the “foreign country”.

But prosecutors said Morsi and the defendants carried out espionage activities on behalf of the “international Muslim Brotherhood organisation and Hamas with an aim to perpetrate terror attacks in the country in order to spread chaos and topple the state” from 2005 to August 2013.

During Morsi’s one year presidency, ties flourished between Cairo and Hamas, a Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood which rules neighbouring Gaza.

But since July, Egypt’s military-installed government has accused Hamas of backing Morsi and his Brotherhood, and carrying out terrorist attacks inside the country.

At Sunday’s hearing Morsi was held separately in a soundproof glass cage, designed to keep him and the other defendants from interrupting the proceedings with outbursts.

But this did not stop defendants including Brotherhood supreme guide Mohamed Badie, his deputy Khairat Al Shater and other Islamist leaders from shouting and rejecting the accusations against them.

“Void, void,” they shouted when the judge asked them if they accepted the charges, an AFP correspondent said.

If found guilty, the defendants could face the death penalty.

Most of the defendants were also accused of moving armed groups in and out of Egypt in January 2011, in a bid to attack army and police installations and prisons to facilitate the escape of inmates.

Also on Sunday the defendants were represented by a new team of 10 defence lawyers appointed by the lawyers’ union, to replace the original team that withdrew from the case.

The trial was adjourned to February 27.

Morsi is already on trial for the killing of protesters during his presidency and a jailbreak during the 2011 uprising that ousted his predecessor Hosni Mubarak.

Egypt’s first democratically elected president, also faces trial for “insulting the judiciary”. A date for that has yet to be set.

TEHRAN — Iran and world powers will hold technical talks “next week” in Vienna ahead of a political meeting to negotiate a comprehensive nuclear deal, a top Iranian negotiator said on Sunday.

Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers agreed last week on a timetable and framework for the negotiations for an accord that would allay Western concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme in return for the lifting of crippling sanctions.

“The issues on the agenda are enrichment [of uranium], the lifting of sanctions and international cooperation on peaceful nuclear energy,” said Abbas Araqchi, also a deputy foreign minister.

Cited by the official IRNA news agency, Araqchi said the talks would take place on the sidelines of a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors “next week”.

He did not specify dates, but the board is set to meet in Vienna from March 3 to 7.

Negotiators hope to reach a final accord by July 20, when an interim agreement reached in November is due to expire.

Western nations and Israel have long suspected Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons capability alongside its civilian programme, charges denied by Tehran.

Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders, who is in Iran on an official two-day visit, expressed the hope that the talks could lead to a restoration of trust between Tehran and the West.

“I hope relationships that are based on trust will be revived with the nuclear negotiations and when a clear, final agreement is reached,” he said at a news conference with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Under the interim deal, Iran agreed to curb parts of its nuclear programme for six months in exchange for limited sanctions relief. The agreement came into effect on January 20.

Political directors from the P5+1 group of world powers — the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany — are set to resume talks with Iranian nuclear negotiators on March 17 in Vienna.

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who is coordinating P5+1 negotiators in the talks, will visit Tehran on March 9 and 10, according to Iranian media reports.

Confirming the reports, Araqchi said Ashton would be on an official mission representing the European Union.

“Mrs Ashton will travel to Iran as the high representative for the European Union and not as the coordinator for the P5+1,” he said.

“But naturally, the nuclear issue will be on the agenda,” Araqchi added.