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US nuclear envoy has 'substantive' talks in NKorea

AFP - Saturday, October 4

SEOUL (AFP) - - US negotiator Christopher Hill said Friday he had "very substantive" talks during his visit to North Korea, but gave no further details of his mission to rescue a crumbling nuclear disarmament pact.

Hill arrived back in South Korea Friday evening after extending his visit by one day but was tight-lipped about his negotiations in Pyongyang, saying he must first brief other parties to the six-nation agreement.

A dispute over inspections of the North's nuclear facilities threatens to wreck last year's agreement under which the North shut down the programme that fuels its nuclear weapons.

The hardline communist state now threatens an imminent restart of its plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, an issue which Hill called a "great concern."

Hill said he raised the Yongbyon issue but gave no indication of the response.

"We went to Pyongyang to have what turned out to be very substantive and very lengthy discussions about the issue of the verification protocol to get through the second phase (of the six-party deal)," Hill told reporters after briefing his South Korean counterpart Kim Sook.

Hill said his talks with North Korean negotiator Kim Kye-Gwan "went into great detail."

The US envoy also met Foreign Minister Pak Ui-Chun and a senior army officer, Colonel General Ri Chan-Bok, who heads the North's military delegation to the border truce village of Panmunjom.

He was to meet his Japanese opposite number Akitaka Saiki in Seoul, and will leave Saturday for Beijing for talks with nuclear negotiator Wu Dawei and Russia's ambassador.

US officials have said Hill was expected to offer the North a face-saving compromise in hopes of settling the verification dispute.

Pyongyang accepted the six-nation aid-for-disarmament deal in February 2007, just four months after staging its first nuclear test.

It shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex in July last year and began disabling it in November. And in June it handed over a declaration of nuclear activities to China.

But now the North is angry that the US failed to respond by removing it from a terrorism blacklist, as required under the accord. It says it will soon begin work to restart a plutonium reprocessing plant, which could produce more bomb-making material from spent fuel rods.

Before delisting occurs, the US demands that the North agree on inspection procedures to ensure it is telling the truth in its declaration.

The North says verification is not part of this stage of the agreement, and accuses Washington of violating its dignity by seeking Iraq-style "house searches" for atomic material.

US officials say a compromise could see the North submitting written acceptance of a verification plan to its ally China rather than to all the negotiators at once.

The Washington Post last week reported that under the proposal, the US would provisionally remove the North from the blacklist and China would then announce the North's acceptance of the plan.

This would allow the North to claim that the US acted first.

The question is whether the secretive North can swallow the US-inspired verification plan, which reportedly calls for access to undeclared suspected nuclear facilities and for inspectors to take samples of material.

The State Department has said Hill would not offer changes to the "substance" of an inspection plan.

North Korea was equally tight-lipped about the visit.

"US Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and his party left here today," the official news agency said in a one-sentence report from Pyongyang.

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