Iran's Expediency Council Chairman and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said on Wednesday that his country would remove the current obstacles to talks with the United States if it shows good will to Tehran, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Rafsanjani made the remarks in a meeting with a number of students from Mashhad's Ferdowsi and medical sciences universities.

Answering a question on Iran's relations with the US, the senior official said that "we will in return remove obstacles in the way of dialogues once the US somehow sends a signal showing good will in its dealings with Iran".

The hegemonic and colonial approach of US officials is the most important impediment to its relations with other countries, he added.

Terming Iran's political independence as an exemplar, Rafsanjani said nowadays no country could interfere the Islamic Republic's major decision-making process.

These affairs are dealt on the will of Iranian people, he stressed.

Tensions of Iran's relations with the US recently has escalated due to Tehran's hardline stance toward the nuclear issue and what Washington said of Iran's "bad role" in Iraq's internal affairs.

The United States has accused Iran of supporting the Iraqi insurgents to fight with coalition forces since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, but Tehran has denied it and saying such allegations were deliberate intervention to the Iran-Iraq ties by the US.

(Xinhua News Agency February 15, 2007)