PREPARATIONS are being made for the return of the remains of murdered Swiss language student Manuela Riedo to her home country.

A Swiss student found murdered in inner-city scrubland was suffocated to death, it was revealed today.

The United States is ready to hold new direct talks with Iran on the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the State Department said today.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dismissed a letter that Iran’s president sent to President George Bush yesterday, saying the first direct communication from an Iranian leader in 27 years did not help resolve the stand-off over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written to President George Bush proposing “new solutions” to their differences in the first letter from an Iranian leader to an American president in 27 years, government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said today.

Iran has ended negotiations with the United States about how to bring calm to Iraq because they were going nowhere, Iran’s foreign minister said tonight, in a rare acknowledgement of official talks with Washington.

The US and Iran have held several meetings in Switzerland in an effort to ease friction between the two countries, a senior American official said today.

SWITZERLAND conceded yesterday that its air traffic controllers were at least partly to blame for the midair collision of a Russian charter jet and a cargo plane which killed 71 people.

The Iranian government has lodged a formal protest with the US authorities after soldiers from a US warship forcibly boarded an Iranian tanker in the Arabian Gulf today, injuring one crew member.