The European Union's foreign policy chief said Friday he is hopeful that stalled talks with Iran over the country's nuclear program can yield an agreement.
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The talks between Tehran and world powers were deadlocked in part over Iran's demand the United States lift a terrorist designation on the country's Revolutionary Guard.
There is little chance of the United States agreeing to remove Iran's elite security force from its list of foreign terrorist organizations any time soon, a French diplomatic source said on Thursday, casting a further pall over nuclear negotiations.
Speaking on the sidelines of a meeting of the Group of Seven major economies in Germany, Josep Borrell, the EU's high representative for foreign policy, said an EU envoy visited Tehran this week for talks that had "gone better than expected."
"The negotiations have been stalled for two months due to this disagreement about what to do with the Revolutionary Guard," Borrell said.
"These kinds of things cannot be solved overnight, but let's say the negotiations were blocked and they have been unblocked, which means there is a perspective of reaching agreement."
The EU envoy to the Iran nuclear talks, Enrique Mora, said Friday that he and his colleagues were briefly detained at Frankfurt Airport while transiting from Tehran to Brussels, in breach of diplomatic rules.
Mora said he had received "not a single explanation" from German authorities for why he was detained. "An EU official on an official mission holding a Spanish diplomatic passport. Took out my passport and my phones," he wrote on Twitter.
He said the EU ambassador to the UN in Vienna and the head of the EU's Iran task force were also detained.
"We were kept separated," Mora wrote. "Refusal to give any explanation for what seems a violation of the Vienna Convention."
Neither German police nor Germany's Foreign Ministry responded immediately to requests for comment.
Borrell declined to speculate on the incident, saying only that "the issue is over."
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