Iran must give a "clear answer" to the international community's offer of a deal on its nuclear programme, Germany's foreign minister has said.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged Iran to "stop dallying" - but Iran says it has no intention of meeting a deadline.

Tehran was given 14 days to agree to stop enriching uranium in return for a pledge to impose no new sanctions - a deadline that runs Israel warns Iran over nuclear ambitions ...
Israeli warns Iran over nuclear ambitions ...
Report: Syria, North Korea Helped Iran Develop Nuclear Program ... out this weekend.

Meanwhile, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has arrived in Iran for talks.

Analysts say the nuclear issue is likely to be high on the agenda when he meets Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Israeli warning

Iran was set the informal deadline on 19 July after its chief nuclear negotiator met officials from the UN, EU and the US in Geneva.

It was the first time senior officials from the US and Iran had held face-to-face talks on the issue.

But so far there has been no answer from Iran.

In an interview with the weekly Der Spiegel, Mr Steinmeier appealed to the Iranians to provide an answer to the offer.

"I appeal again to the Iranian side no longer to play for time, but to give us a usable answer to our offers - stop dallying," he said.

But Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said no deadline had been agreed.

"We have not had any discussion [or] agreement of the so-called timeline of two weeks," he said.

The disagreements came as Israel's deputy prime minister warned that Iran was near a breakthrough in its nuclear programme.

Shaul Mofaz, a frontrunner to succeed Ehud Olmert as prime minister later in the year, said Iran could be capable of producing weapons-grade uranium by 2010.

"It's a race against time and time is winning," he said.

The UN Security Council has already imposed three sets of sanctions on Iran.

The US has hinted that a fourth could follow if the current offer is rejected by Tehran.

But analysts say the Geneva deadline always threatened to be counter-productive - especially when there was no immediate penalty for not complying.

Tehran has said it will offer its own ideas in its own time - perhaps in the next two weeks.

Iran has claimed consistently that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, but the US and its allies believe it could be used to develop a nuclear weapon.

(BBC)

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