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SEOUL: A US envoy crossed the inter-Korean border into South Korea on Saturday, bringing back documents about North Korea's nuclear activities as part of efforts to disarm the communist state.
Sung Kim, director of the State Department's Korea office who led a delegation to the North Korean capital Pyongyang on Thursday, returned to the South by land through a joint security area known as Panmunjom, an AFP photographer on the scene said.
He and three others were carrying a total of seven cardboard boxes which reportedly contained some 18,000 pages of documents related to North Korea's plutonium program.
"We have to take them back and see," Sung Kim told journalists when asked about their contents, seconds after crossing the military demarcation line dividing the two Koreas.
The papers handed over by Pyongyang to Sung Kim will be used in the process to verify an eventual declaration from North Korea on its past nuclear activities, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has said.
A senior South Korean foreign ministry official, who met Sung Kim hours before his North Korea trip, was quoted as telling Yonhap news agency here that the documents were mainly operational logs of nuclear facilities in Yongbyon.
These consist of a nuclear reactor, a nuclear fuel fabrication facility, and a facility for reprocessing plutonium.
The New York Times quoted an unidentified senior US official as saying that the documents contain information about North Korea's three major campaigns to reprocess plutonium for nuclear weapons, in 1990, 2003 and 2005.
But the documents do not include details on two other areas about which North Korea has promised to be forthcoming -- a uranium enrichment programme that some US officials regard as another track toward weapons development, and North Korea's alleged involvement in nuclear proliferation, it said.
Yonhap said Pyongyang and Washington had agreed to contain Pyongyang's "acknowledgement" of US concerns about the suspected uranium programme and nuclear proliferation in separate confidential minutes, apart from a main declaration of the plutonium-based programmes.
The North, which staged its first nuclear test in October 2006, is disabling its plutonium-producing reactor and other plants under a deal reached last year with the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea.
But disputes over the declaration due last December 31 have blocked the start of the final phase of the process -- the permanent dismantling of the plants and the handover of all material.
The declaration is crucial to verifying that all material, including stockpiled plutonium which could be used for bomb-making, is accounted for.
In return for total denuclearization, the North would receive energy aid, a lifting of US sanctions, the establishment of diplomatic relations with Washington and a formal peace treaty.
Spokesman Moon Tae-Young of the South Korean foreign ministry said Friday North Korea will also present copies of the same documents to China, which in turn will share the information with other participants in six-party talks.
"I think the next round of six party talks will resume late this month or early June," he said.
A senior South Korean government official said the North's delivery of the documents strengthened belief in Pyongyang's sincerity toward the six-party process.
"It is significant that the North yielded information concerning its past nuclear activities that it had adamantly refused to give up," he said. - AFP/ac
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