Iran said it will be impossible by the November 24 deadline to reach a comprehensive agreement with the six world powers over Tehran's nuclear issue, due to time limit and lots of details yet to be discussed, Iran's Students News Agency or ISNA reported Sunday, quoting a member of the country's negotiating team.
The report indicated that Iran is considering to extend the time of the talks by up to a year. "The issue of extension of the talks is an option on the table and we will start discussing it if no deal is reached by Sunday night", the source said.
The latest round of nuclear talks between Iran and the so-called P5+1 nations, comprising of the US, UK, France, China, Russia and Germany, started on Tuesday in the Austrian capital city of Vienna.
The Iranian negotiating team reportedly said that the main stumbling block in the way of resolving the Western dispute over Iran's nuclear energy program remains to be the removal of all the bans imposed on the country, and not the number of centrifuges or the level of uranium enrichment.
The report suggested that Tehran wants the sanctions entirely lifted while Washington insists that at least the UN-imposed sanctions should remain in place.
On Saturday, the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said there were still serious gaps in talks over Iran's nuclear work.
"We've been, obviously, having difficult talks here - complicated topic. We're working hard. We hope we're making careful progress, but we have big gaps. We still have some serious gaps which we're working to close. The good thing is the P5+1 are united and working in concert, and we're simply going to not say anything substantive about the discussions while they're going on. But a lot of a serious work is going on by a lot of people. We're grateful for the cooperation," Kerry said.
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