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SEOUL: South Korea said Thursday it is trying to gauge North Korea's intentions after the communist state disputed the US version of an agreement on verifying its nuclear activities.
North Korea said Wednesday it had never agreed to let inspectors take samples from atomic plants as part of a six-nation aid-for-disarmament deal.
The US State Department insisted that the North did consent to sampling but declined to confirm whether a row has erupted over the issue.
The dispute over ways to verify the North's nuclear inventory is just the latest hurdle in tortuous six-nation negotiations, which began in 2003 and have often come close to breakdown.
South Korea's Foreign Minister Yu Myung-Hwan described the North's ban on sampling as disappointing.
"The sampling issue is the core focus of the verification measure," he told local editors, in comments confirmed by his ministry.
"The US and North Korea held their recent talks on this understanding."
Yu said South Korea's nuclear envoy Kim Sook and his US counterpart Christopher Hill held telephone talks earlier Thursday on Pyongyang's stance.
"The US will have additional contacts with North Korea to ascertain its intentions," he said.
"There is understanding among the five parties, aside from North Korea, that the agreement on the verification measures include sampling."
Senior North Korean foreign ministry official Ri Gun held talks on verification in New York last week with Hill and Hill's deputy Sung Kim.
"There is a need to analyse why North Korea issued such a statement before Ri's return," Yu said.
The six-nation forum - the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan - reached agreement on a denuclearisation pact last year.
The North, which tested an atomic weapon in 2006, was to disable the plants at Yongbyon that produced weapons-grade plutonium and declare all its nuclear activities in return for energy aid and diplomatic benefits.
The pact nearly collapsed this autumn over verification procedures until Hill travelled to Pyongyang in early October to negotiate a compromise.
US officials said at the time that outside experts would be allowed to visit both declared and undeclared sites, take and remove samples and equipment for analysis, view documents and interview staff.
However, visits to sites not included in the North's inventory handed over in June would require "mutual consent."
The North said verification would be confined to Yongbyon and would involve only field visits, confirmation of documents and interviews with technicians.
The State Department, however, said Wednesday there had been "understandings" that experts could take samples and remove them from the country for testing.
US officials say such sampling is crucial to checking how much bomb-making plutonium the North produced in the past - and how many bombs it could theoretically make.
North Korea was promised one million tons of fuel oil, or energy aid of equivalent value, in return for disabling its plants but only about half of this has been received.
The North said Wednesday said it had slowed down disablement work in protest.
"In case the economic compensation continues to be delayed, the tempo of the disablement will be decreased accordingly, making it hard to predict the prospect of the six-party talks," it said.
The State Department said it has arranged to ship another 50,000 tons of oil by next month.
- AFP/yb
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