Washington, September 19: The US Ambassador to the UN says it is unlikely that there will be a ‘direct engagement’ between the leaders of the US and Iran at the UN General Assembly.
“With respect to the Iranian leader, I don’t think there is much likelihood that there will be an interaction,” the US envoy to the United Nations Susan Rice said on Friday regarding President Barack Obama meeting with visiting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at next week’s United nations General Assembly.
“There is no obvious venue in which that would occur, and certainly we have no meetings or anything of the sort planned,” the US official noted.
Rice added that the five members of the Security Council and Germany would emphasize that “Iran meets its nuclear obligations.”
The news came a few hours after the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned on Friday that Iran would face isolation and economic pressure should it continue to defy its nuclear activities.
However, UN’s nuclear watchdog the IAEA (the International Atomic Energy Agency), declared in a Thursday statement that it had no proof that Iran has, or once had, a covert atomic bomb program, reaffirming that the allegations claiming that the agency was sitting on undeniable evidence that Iran has been pursuing a military nuclear program were “politically motivated and baseless.”
—–Agencies