DUBAI: Iran’s Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated on Wednesday (Jun 4) Tehran won’t abandon its uranium enrichment, rejecting a key US demand aimed toward resolving a decades-long nuclear dispute, that he stated was towards the Islamic Republic’s pursuits.
The US proposal for a new nuclear deal was offered to Iran on Saturday by Oman, which has mediated talks between Iranian International Minister Abbas Araqchi and President Donald Trump’s Center East envoy, Steve Witkoff.
After 5 spherical of talks, a number of hard-to-bridge points stay, together with Iran’s insistence on sustaining uranium enrichment on its soil and Tehran’s refusal to ship overseas its whole current stockpile of extremely enriched uranium – attainable uncooked materials for nuclear bombs.
“Uranium enrichment is the important thing to our nuclear programme and the enemies have centered on the enrichment,” Khamenei stated in a televised speech. The US proposal “contradicts our nation’s perception in self-reliance and the precept of ‘We Can’,” he stated.
“The impolite and smug leaders of America repeatedly demand that we should always not have a nuclear programme. Who’re you to determine whether or not Iran ought to have an enrichment?,” he added.
Tehran says it desires to grasp nuclear know-how for peaceable functions and has lengthy denied accusations by Western powers that it’s in search of to develop nuclear weapons.
