"The meeting will take place in Vienna on Friday afternoon," Iran's representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Asghar Soltanieh, told AFP in the Austrian capital.

"Of course it will be about the nuclear issues we have vis-a-vis the IAEA."

But he added: "It will not be about the UN (Security Council) resolutions. We always said that the UN resolutions are without legal basis."

However, the ambassador said Iran was "cooperating with the IAEA" and would continue to do so.

ElBaradei has called on Iran to declare a moratorium on expanding uranium enrichment operations in order to defuse the crisis over Western fears that Tehran seeks atomic weapons.

Iran's supreme national security council has announced that Larijani and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana would meet in Lisbon on Saturday, in their latest attempt to break the deadlock on the Iranian nuclear programme.

The two men last met on May 31 in Madrid, but no breakthrough was reported.

Iran has so far been slapped with two sets of UN Security Council sanctions and faces a third for its refusal to suspend sensitive enrichment work, the process which makes nuclear fuel and the fissile core of an atom bomb.

The oil-rich country insists it only wants to make nuclear fuel to meet its growing energy demands.

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