Iran added demands unrelated to discussions on its nuclear program during the latest talks and made alarming progress on uranium enrichment, the US envoy for the talks said on Tuesday. a nuclear deal.

US special envoy for Iran Robert Malley said there was a proposal on the table for a timetable in which Iran could return to compliance with the nuclear deal and Washington could ease sanctions on Tehran. .

Indirect talks between Tehran and Washington aimed at breaking the deadlock over how to salvage Iran’s 2015 nuclear pact ended in Doha, Qatar, last week without the hoped-for progress.

Malley said Iranian negotiators added new demands.

“They have, including in Doha, added demands that I think anyone watching this would be seen as having nothing to do with the nuclear deal, things they wanted in the past,” he said. he said in an interview with National Public Radio. .

The demands included some that the United States and the Europeans said could not be part of the negotiations.

“The discussion that really needs to happen right now is not so much between us and Iran, although we’re ready to have it. It’s between Iran and itself,” Malley said. “They need to come to a conclusion as to whether they are now ready to return in accordance with the agreement.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said on Twitter after speaking with top EU diplomat Josep Borrell, “An agreement is only possible on the basis of understanding and “mutual interests. We remain ready to negotiate a strong and lasting agreement. The United States must decide whether it wants a deal or insists on sticking to its unilateral demands.”

State Department spokesman Ned Price said there are currently no further rounds of book talks with Iran, adding that Tehran has repeatedly introduced weeks and months, foreign demands that go beyond the limits of the nuclear agreement reached in 2015.

“Introducing anything beyond the narrow confines of the JCPOA suggests a lack of seriousness, suggests a lack of commitment. And that’s unfortunately what the team saw again in Doha,” Price told reporters.

As part of the nuclear pact, Tehran has limited its uranium enrichment program, a potential route to nuclear weapons, although Iran says it seeks only civilian atomic energy.

Then-US President Donald Trump scrapped the deal in 2018, calling it too soft on Iran, and reimposed harsh US sanctions, prompting Tehran to violate the pact’s nuclear limits.

Now Tehran is much closer to having enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb, Malley said, although they don’t appear to have resumed their weapons program. “But we are of course alarmed, as are our partners, by the progress they have made in the area of ​​enrichment,” Malley said.

Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to make a bomb and could do so within weeks, he said.

Malley said the Americans were also working on a parallel track to secure the release of Americans detained in Iran. Siamak Namazi, who was detained in 2015 and is the longest serving Iranian-American prisoner, appealed for help in a New York Times Sunday’s article headlined, “I am an American, why was I left to rot as a hostage of Iran?”

“We hope that regardless of what happens with the nuclear talks, we will be able to resolve this issue as it weighs on our minds every day,” Malley said.