Iran to Present 'New Initiatives' at Nuclear Talks

Iran is to present "new initiatives" at nuclear talks with world powers in Istanbul on the weekend, the official leading the country's negotiating team, Saeed Jalili, said on Wednesday.

"The Iranian delegation will have new initiatives and we hope that the other party will have a constructive approach," he told Iran's Arab-language network al-Alam, without elaborating.

Jalili, who is close to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, also warned the Western nations taking part to not try to add to its coercive pressure on Iran.

"The language of threat and pressure has never yielded results and only reinforces the determination of the Iranian people," he said.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad echoed that statement in separate comments carried by the official news agency IRNA.

"The language of force and insults will give no result," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying.

"I say to them in the name of the Iranian people that the method you have adopted will have no result. They need to change their language and speak with respect," he said.

Iran's lawmakers at the same time issued a statement backing Jalili's team, advising the world powers to accept "the undeniable reality" that Iran has a right to nuclear energy and urging "an end to the current trend" of sanctions.

The 204 MPs in the 290-seat parliament also underlined Iran's "opposition to nuclear weapons" as voiced by Khamenei.

The Istanbul talks, due to be held on Saturday, are to bring together Iran and the so-called P5+1 group comprising the five permanent U.N. Security Council members (the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China) plus Germany.

The negotiations are seen as a crucial opportunity to lower international tensions in the standoff over Iran's nuclear program.

The United States and its European allies suspect Iran's activities mask a drive to get to the "breakout" threshold of having the capability to make atomic weapons.

They have imposed increasingly severe economic sanctions on the Islamic republic to pressure it to halt activities, notably uranium enrichment.

Iran denies any military dimension to its nuclear activities and has responded defiantly by accelerating them. It also asserts that the sanctions are having little effect and will never force it to make concessions.

Khamenei in February stated that Iran considered nuclear weapons "a sin," echoing a 2005 fatwa he is said to have issued declaring the atomic bomb haram, or antithetical to Islam.