Iran's foreign minister insisted Sunday there were no plans here to receive a delegation of US officials, just days after a US senator announced a group of congressional aides were to make a historic visit this month.
"It is not planned," Kamal Kharazi told reporters, and his comments were later echoed by foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.
"Parliamentary delegations are not coming to Iran. It is not planned and it is not in our agenda," Asefi said in his weekly press conference.
On Friday a US senator announced that a group of congressional aides were to go to Iran in February on the first official US visit there since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said the visit could set the stage for a later mission by US lawmakers.
The United States severed relations with the Islamic government in Iran in 1980 following a crisis over hostages seized from the US embassy in Tehran. Only two years ago President George W. Bush said that Iran was part of a weapons proliferating "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea.
The US senator, who had met the Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said the delegation was "confirmed" for February.
He gave no exact date, but press reports have pointed to February 11 - just over a week before Iran is due to go to the polls in parliamentary elections that currently appear in doubt due to a reformist-conservative dispute here over candidate disqualifications.
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