US envoy seeking to save nuke deal extends stay in NKorea

By Jun Kwanwoo AFP - Thursday, October 2 08:30 am

SEOUL (AFP) - US negotiator Christopher Hill has extended his stay in North Korea where he is trying to save a crumbling nuclear disarmament deal, US and South Korean officials said Thursday.

It was unclear whether the extension indicated Hill was making progress in trying to dissuade the hardline communist state from restarting the nuclear programme it shut down 14 months ago.

A US embassy spokesman said the assistant secretary of state would not be returning Thursday afternoon as expected, but had no information on when he would come back.

A South Korean foreign ministry official involved in six-nation nuclear negotiations also said Hill's delegation would not cross the border Thursday. "But we do not know exactly when they will return," he told AFP.

US officials in Washington earlier confirmed media reports that Hill would offer a face-saving compromise in his attempt to rescue the 2007 agreement which led the North to shut down its plutonium-producing plants.

Hill, making his third visit to North Korea, drove across the heavily fortified inter-Korean border Wednesday en route to Pyongyang and talks with his counterpart Kim Kye-Gwan.

He was to hold more talks Thursday, the US State Department said.

The North staged a nuclear weapons test in October 2006 before returning to six-party negotiations which reached a deal in February 2007.

Pyongyang shut down its Yongbyon complex in July 2007 and began disabling it last November. But it is angry that the US failed to remove it from a terrorism blacklist, as required under the accord.

Last week it announced it would soon begin work to restart a plutonium reprocessing plant which could produce more bomb-making material from spent fuel rods.

Before the delisting, the US demands that the North accept an agreement on outside verification of the nuclear declaration which it delivered to China in June.

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

China, the North's sole major ally and host of the six-party talks, is the focus of a possible face-saving compromise, US officials said Wednesday.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack gave no details except to say Beijing could play the "special role" it has in the past "as a repository for documents and information."

A senior US official said the deal could see Washington remove Pyongyang from the blacklist if it submits written acceptance of the verification plan to China.

The official said the original idea was for the North to submit its agreement to all five partners -- South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the US.

The Washington Post last week reported that after the US provisionally removes the North from the blacklist, China would announce North Korea's acceptance of the verification plan.

This would allow the Pyongyang government to claim that the US acted first.

However, McCormack firmly denied reports that Hill was carrying proposed changes to the actual verification plan.

The US-inspired protocol reportedly calls for access to undeclared suspected nuclear facilities and for inspectors to take samples of material.

Despite the nuclear tensions, South and North Korea Thursday held working-level military talks , their first official contact in eight months.

But talks ended earlier than scheduled and with little progress reported.

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