[Al Arabiya Latest] Diplomats from six major powers meet on Saturday to discuss whether Iran should face new U.N. sanctions for refusing to halt sensitive nuclear work, but Western envoys said China's decision to send a low-level official ruled out a quick deal.Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States are sending top officials of their respective foreign ministries at the meeting hosted by the European Union.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Monday that the six would explore "the kind and degree of sanctions that we should be pursuing" as Iran doggedly refused to comply with U.N. demands to halt uranium enrichment.
Diplomats said Western members of the group of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany were likely to present their Russian and Chinese colleagues with a range of new and tougher sanctions.
The goal is to crank up the pressure on Iran to accept a U.N.-brokered deal aimed at allaying suspicions about the nature of its nuclear program by shipping most of its low enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile abroad to be further enriched into reactor fuel.
But Tehran has ignored a U.S.-set Dec. 31 deadline to back the offer, drawn up by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, and countered with its own proposal of a simultaneous and staged swap of LEU with reactor fuel.