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SEOUL: US negotiator Christopher Hill arrived in North Korea on Wednesday in an attempt to save a crumbling nuclear disarmament deal, after saying negotiations with Pyongyang have reached a "very tough" phase.
Hill, an assistant secretary of state, crossed the heavily fortified border at the truce village of Panmunjom, the US military said, in what is his third visit to the hardline communist state in 16 months.
In Pyongyang, he will urge the North to halt moves to restart its nuclear weapons programme and return to a February 2007 six-nation deal which appears close to collapse.
"I would say we are in a difficult and very tough phase of negotiations," Hill told reporters late Tuesday after talks in Seoul with his South Korean counterpart Kim Sook.
He said the two sides had had some discussions through North Korea's UN mission in New York and "we thought it would be useful to try to have those discussions in Pyongyang".
The North, angry at the US failure to remove it from a terrorism blacklist, has announced it will begin restarting its plutonium reprocessing plant at Yongbyon. It has barred UN atomic inspectors from the building.
The ageing Yongbyon complex is at the heart of the country's decades-old nuclear ambitions, which culminated in a weapons test in October 2006.
The North shut down Yongbyon in July 2007 and began disabling the plants in November that year. In return Pyongyang was to receive one million tons of fuel oil or equivalent energy aid and Washington was to remove it from the terror blacklist.
However, Washington refuses to act on the delisting until the North accepts procedures for outside verification of a nuclear declaration which it submitted in June.
The North says verification is not part of this stage of the agreement. It accuses the United States of violating its dignity by seeking "house searches," such as in Iraq.
Some US media reports say Washington could be willing to compromise on the verification demands to save face for the regime.
Last week, The Washington Post said one idea being considered by Hill was that North Korea would give talks host China a plan that includes sampling, access to key sites and other provisions sought by the United States.
US President George W. Bush would then provisionally remove the North from the terrorism list, after which China would announce North Korea's acceptance of the verification plan, the newspaper said.
This would allow Pyongyang to assert that the delisting occurred before the verification plan was in place, the Post added.
State Department spokesman Robert Wood, in a Washington briefing Tuesday, said Hill was going to the North "with some ideas on how to move this process forward," but did not elaborate.
Hill will have talks with the North's nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-Gwan, but it was unclear who else he would meet or how long he would stay.
The State Department said he is scheduled to go on to China on Friday and then Japan, but the schedule may change.
The six-party talks group the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.
North Korea is estimated to have produced enough plutonium for around six bombs before Yongbyon was shut down. Analysts believe it could produce enough material for one more bomb if it resumes reprocessing spent fuel rods.
- AFP/yt
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