US officials meet Armenian minister on Turkey deal

After leaving for the ceremony, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton returned to a Zurich hotel so that US officials could meet Nalbandian. The Armenian delegation had not left for the venue where the deal was due to be signed at 5pm (1500 GMT).

"We're helping facilitate the two sides come to agreement on statements that are going to come out," US State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters. "There's not a breakdown."

The deal has faced fierce opposition from nationalists on both sides, and from an Armenian diaspora that insists Turkey acknowledge the killings of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces in World War One as genocide.

A decades-old dispute between Turkey's ally Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh had hung over the deal after talks between Azeri and Armenian leaders over the region ended without result on Friday.

The State Department corrected a previous statement in which it said Clinton herself was meeting Nalbandian.

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