The source told IRNA that the Iranian foreign minister will be exchanging views with senior Iranian officials on some issues. Zarif has already held two rounds of talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry and European Union envoy Catherine Ashton.

The talks in Vienna are aimed to work out a final deal ending the longstanding standoff over the Islamic Republic’s civilin nuclear energy program before a November 24 deadline.

The Iranian foreign minister is scheduled to meet his French counterpart Laurent Fabius and British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond in Vienna on Friday afternoon.

Negotiations over Iran’s nuclear energy program enter their fourth day in the Austrian capital, Vienna.

Iran’s Foreign Minister and top nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif, US Secretary of State John Kerry and EU representative Catherine Ashton sat down for the second round of a trilateral meeting on Tehran’s nuclear work on Friday.

Sources close to the Iranian negotiating team say the main stumbling block in the way of resolving the Western dispute over Iran’s nuclear energy program remains to be the removal of all the bans imposed on the country, and not the number of centrifuges or the level of uranium enrichment, PRESS TV reported.

Tehran wants the sanctions entirely lifted while Washington, under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby, insists that at least the UN-imposed sanctions should remain in place.

Meanwhile as AFP reports “Zarif is not returning to Tehran for consultations on nuclear talks”, a source in the Iranian delegation said Friday.

"We have presented different ideas since (a meeting earlier this month) in Muscat. These ideas are not yet at the point for Zarif to be able to take them back to Tehran. As a result he is not going to Tehran and the talks will continue," the source told AFP.