Iran and six powers on Friday agreed to continue talking for four more months after failing to meet a July 20 deadline to reach a deal on curbing the Iranian nuclear programme in exchange for ending sanctions, enabling Tehran to access $2.8 billion of frozen cash.
But US officials warned that most sanctions against the Islamic Republic would remain in place.c
The announcement came in the early hours of Saturday after nearly three weeks of marathon talks in a 19th century Viennese palace, where senior officials from Iran, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China were holed up in negotiating rooms struggling to reach an agreement.
Iran will be allowed to access in tranches an additional $2.8 billion of its frozen assets during the period of extended talks, senior US officials told reporters in Vienna.
"Iran will not get any more money during these four months than it did during the last six months, and the vast majority of its frozen oil revenues will remain inaccessible," US Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement released in Vienna on Saturday. "We will continue to vigorously enforce the sanctions that remain in place."
It remains uncertain whether four more months of high-stakes talks will yield a final deal, since major underlying differences remain after six rounds of meetings this year.
Western nations fear Iran's nuclear programme may be aimed at developing a nuclear weapons capability. Tehran denies this.
The six powers want Iran to significantly scale back its nuclear enrichment programme to make sure it cannot yield nuclear bombs. Iran wants sanctions that have severely damaged its oil-dependent economy to be lifted as soon as possible.
After years of rising tension between Iran and the West and fears of a new Middle East war, last year's election of a pragmatist, Hassan Rouhani, as Iran's president led to a thaw in ties that resulted in November's diplomatic breakthrough.
In exchange for the $2.8 billion, Kerry said, Iran has agreed to continue neutralizing its most sensitive uranium stocks - uranium that has been enriched to a level of 20 percent purity - by converting it to fuel for a research reactor in Tehran that is used to make medical isotopes.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told reporters earlier this week that Tehran would be willing to delay development of an industrial-scale uranium enrichment programme for up to seven years and to keep the 19,000 centrifuges it has installed so far for this purpose.
But Kerry said after several face-to-face meetings with Zarif it was "crystal clear" that for Iran to keep all of its existing centrifuges was out of the question.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Zarif spoke of "significant gaps" in a joint statement they issued in the early hours of Saturday.
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