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VIENNA - The UN nuclear watchdog's inspectors at North Korea's nuclear facilities at Yongbyon will no longer have access to the site's nuclear installations, the agency announced Thursday.
"The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has today informed IAEA inspectors that, effective immediately, access to facilities at Yongbyon would no longer be permitted," the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement.
"They are no longer allowed to carry out the monitoring and verification of any nuclear activity whatsoever," IAEA spokesman Marc Vidricaire also told AFP.
Pyongyang announced in September that it planned to restart its nuclear reprocessing plant at Yongbyon, used to make weapons-grade material, and that IAEA inspectors would have no further access to it.
"Now they have no access to any nuclear installation whatsoever, although they can remain in their quarters at Yongbyon," Vidricaire added.
"The DPRK also stated that it has stopped its disablement work," the IAEA added in its statement.
Pyongyang's nuclear disablement was part of a six-party disarmament-for-aid deal with the United States, China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.
"Since it is preparing to restart the facilities at Yongbyon, the DPRK has informed the IAEA that our monitoring activities would no longer be appropriate," the UN agency also noted.
North Korea announced in August that it had halted the dismantling of key nuclear facilities in protest at Washington's refusal to drop it from the US blacklist of countries supporting terrorism, as had been promised in the six-party deal, agreed in February 2007.
Japan's Kyodo News agency reported Thursday that Washington had told Tokyo that it would take North Korea off the blacklist in October, in a bid to jumpstart the deadlocked talks.
Japan, which has tense relations with North Korea, told the United States it was unhappy with the decision, Kyodo added, without identifying its sources.
Washington has pressed for more concrete ways to verify North Korea's declaration of its nuclear programmes made under the agreement.
But Japan and some US conservatives have accused US President George W. Bush of giving up too much to North Korea in a bid to score a foreign policy success in his final days in office.
- AFP /ls
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