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MADRID - Iran's chief negotiator Ali Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana failed to reach a breakthrough on the Iranian nuclear deadlock in a meeting on Thursday but the two said they would meet again soon.
Larijani told reporters the talks had been constructive but there was no question that Iran would suspend a nuclear programme the West believes aims at making nuclear weapons despite the threat of harsher international sanctions.
"We have abandoned the (suspension) issue, why doesn't the media abandon this issue? The suspension issue has become a media game," Larijani said.
The two men will consult again in Madrid on Friday, but not necessarily face to face, a Solana aide said.
They will meet again in about two weeks, the two men said.
Solana's four-and-a-half-hour exploratory talks with Larijani on a former hunting estate outside Madrid had looked like a last stab at easing the tense standoff before world powers sharpen UN sanctions.
"We exchanged ideas about how to move the process forward towards negotiations we touched on several issues, in particular the outstanding issues Iran has with the agency (International Atomic Energy Agency)," Solana said.
"We are seeking a new impetus for negotiations and we agreed to meet again the week after next," he said, describing a "good positive atmosphere".
Earlier, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said it was time for Iran to abandon uranium enrichment work.
"It is time for Iran to change its tactics. The international community is united on what Iran should do and this is to suspend (enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel)," Rice said during a visit to Vienna.
Major powers insist Iran stop enriching uranium as a confidence-building precondition for negotiations on trade and other benefits offered to Tehran a year ago. Iran says it wants atomic power for electricity only.
Foreign ministers of the Group of Eight top industrialised nations said on Wednesday Iran faced further sanctions after it failed not only to stop enriching by a UN deadline of May 24 but widened the disputed programme.
Enrichment is a process of refining uranium for power plants or, if taken to a very high degree, atomic bombs.
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week laid bare how Iran was accelerating a campaign to install 3,000 enrichment centrifuges by mid-summer, laying a basis for "industrial-scale" fuel production.
Rice reiterated a US offer made a year ago that if Iran gave up uranium enrichment work, Washington was ready to reverse decades of American policy and talk to Tehran on any issue.
Solana's spokeswoman said he was sticking to the Security Council's "double suspension" formula -- getting Iran to suspend enrichment in return for a suspension of sanctions and full negotiations, even though Iran has repeatedly spurned it.
"There doesn't seem to be a lot of point to these talks, particularly on top of this negative IAEA report," said another EU diplomat. "But the point is to keep the negotiating track open" to stem a feared slide into conflict.
There have been suggestions the West might settle for a partial enrichment halt to nudge Iran into negotiations.
Washington and key EU allies have publicly denied this, saying Iran would still be able to perfect enrichment technology with a limited centrifuge operation.
But some German officials have been privately receptive to a compromise with Iran, diplomats say. A diplomat with access to intelligence said an Iranian official would hold unannounced talks in Germany next week to get it to "lend support to an interim solution that would not include full suspension".
Solana is empowered by the five permanent Security Council members -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France -- plus Germany and the EU to explore the scope for formal talks on a package of economic, technological and political initiatives if Iran shelves nuclear fuel production.
- REUTERS
