Iran leader vows Tehran will 'not step back one iota'

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has said he has set limits for the country's negotiators at nuclear talks, which resume on Wednesday in Geneva.

As senior diplomats from Iran and six major powers gathered again in the Swiss lakeside city, 10 days after coming close to a historic deal, Khamenei delivered a defiant speech to volunteer militiamen, the Basij, in an apparent attempt to reassure the country's hardliners that the regime was not make strategic concessions.

"We do insist that we will not step back one iota from our rights," the supreme leader said.

The 74 year-old cleric is the single most powerful figure in the regime but despite his title, does not wield absolute power. Rather, he has to juggle a variety of interest groups and factions. The Basij are under the control of the powerful Revolutionary Guards force.

Khamenei used his speech to reaffirm his overall control over the direction of the talks, which are being conducted by a team led by the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

"We do not intervene in the details of these talks. There are certain red lines and limits. These have to be observed. They are instructed to abide by those limits," he said.

Security for the three days of negotiations in Geneva was noticeably higher than for the previous round, following Tuesday's bomb attack on the Iranian embassy in Beirut, which killed at least 22 people.

The Geneva talks are due to take off again on Wednesday afternoon with a meeting between Zarif and Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief who chairs the six-negotiating group comprising the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China.

The previous round of nuclear talks ended in the early hours of 10 November, amid differences on whether any interim agreement should state that Iran had a right to enrich uranium, and whether any construction work should continue on Iran's heavy water reactor in Arak.

In the runup to the latest round, due to finish on Friday, there were signs that gaps on both issues had narrowed, with Zarif saying that Iran did not require other countries' permission to continue enrichment, and the emergence of a possible compromise over Arak in which work on uranium fuel assemblies would be halted, while other construction activities continued.

In his speech, Khamenei singled out France for criticism, in likely response to the tough line taken at the last Geneva round by the French delegation.

French officials, Khamenei said, were "not only succumbing to the United States, but they are kneeling before the Israeli regime".

He derided US government policies but insisted Iran had no animosity towards the American people and seeks "friendly" relations.

The remarks were met with the traditional revolutionary chant of: "Death to America."

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, kept up a lobbying campaign against the proposed interim deal with Iran, flying to Moscow on Wednesday to urge Vladimir Putin to toughen the Russian negotiating position in Geneva. Disagreements on the negotiations have already caused a significant cooling in relations between Israel and the US.