Iranian and western officials claimed to have made a breakthrough in nuclear negotiations in Lausanne on Thursday night, and said they were drafting a joint statement.

After eight days of talks, often going late into the night, the Iranian foreign minister Mohammed Javad Zarif tweeted: “Found solutions. Ready to start drafting immediately.”



Found solutions. Ready to start drafting immediately. — Javad Zarif (@JZarif) April 2, 2015

A few minutes earlier, the EU foreign policy chief Frederica Mogherini tweeted that she and Zarif would soon have “good news” for the waiting press.

Diplomats said that even as journalists were told to assemble at a technical institute in Lausanne, Iranian and western foreign ministers were still negotiating the text of an accord.

The deal is intended to be a provisional framework for a comprehensive agreement that is not due to be signed until the end of June, but if it includes concrete facts and figures, it will mark a significant breakthrough in the 12-year history of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme.



The Iranian delegation led by Zarif was said to be arguing for as few details as possible to be released, out of concern that anything published before a final agreement would become a hostage to fortune, a target for hardliners on both sides.

The US secretary of state, John Kerry, requires as many specifics as possible, as he needs them to convince Congress not to impose new sanctions. European diplomats said that compromise would involve a secret annex containing agreed parameters.

The negotiations were the 19th round of high-level talks in the 18 months since Zarif and US secretary of state John Kerry first met on the margins of the 2013 UN general assembly.



The talks – the culmination of a 12-year process – became hung up on the issues of Iran’s nuclear centrifuge research, details on the lifting of UN sanctions, and how they would be re-imposed if Iran breached the agreement.

Zarif, Kerry, the Germany foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Mogherini, held a night session on Wednesday in Lausanne’s Beau-Rivage Palace hotel, lasting more than eight hours and ending at 6am on Thursday.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, joined the talks at midnight, and the UK foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, returned after a few hours’ break.

Foreign ministry political directors remained in the conference rooms even after the ministers had gone to bed, and the ministerial negotiations resumed just before 11am.

The Bloomberg news agency quoted the diplomatic historian Alan Henrikson as saying that a US secretary of state had not stayed at a single site negotiating a single issue for such a long time since the 1978 Camp David negotiations with Egypt and Israel.

It is almost 100 years since Washington’s top diplomats spent so much time negotiating on foreign soil. The last time was the 1919 Versailles peace conference after the first world war, Henrikson said.