DHAKA: US president Barack Obama has exchanged letters with his new Iranian counterpart Hassan Rohani in recent weeks, and the two leaders may hold a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York later this month.

The Los Angeles Times quoted US officials as saying, reports The Jerusalem Post.

According to the Thursday report in the Times, Washington and Tehran have been discussing the situation in Syria and tentatively laying the framework for direct talks over Iran`s disputed nuclear program.

Such face-to-face talks would mark the first such interaction between the countries since the severing of diplomatic ties in 1978.

At a meeting of the UN’s nuclear watchdog on Wednesday, both the United States and the European Union expressed hope that the election of Rohani, a relative moderate who took office as new Iranian president in early August, would lead to a softening of the Islamic state’s nuclear defiance.

But they also said Iran had continued to increase its nuclear capacity in recent months and that no progress had been made so far in a long-stalled UN investigation into suspected atomic bomb research by Iran, which denies any such activity.

Reinforcing the West’s message that time was of the essence in moving to resolve the decade-old nuclear dispute, the European Union told Tehran that any ‘further procrastination is unacceptable’.

BDST: 1647 HRS, SEPT 12, 2013
RoR/Jck