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US negotiator in N Korea
21/06/2007 08:09 - (SA)
Seoul - US chief negotiator Christopher Hill flew to North Korea on a surprise trip on Thursday to push for swift progress in nuclear disarmament, the most senior US official to visit in nearly five years.
Hill landed in the capital Pyongyang, China's Xinhua news agency reported, to follow up an apparent breakthrough in long-running talks on scrapping the communist state's nuclear programme.
Yonhap news agency, quoting diplomatic sources, said he earlier left Osan air base in South Korea on a US military plane.
It said the invitation had come from Pyongyang, and that he would meet his North Korean counterpart, vice foreign minister Kim Kye-Gwan, about follow-up measures on denuclearisation and normalising North Korea-US ties.
The US State Department confirmed the mission, saying Hill would spend the night in Pyongyang and leave on Friday.
It said his visit "is part of a round of consultations with his six-party counterparts to move the six-party process forward," referring to the nations involved in disarmament talks.
"It is critical for the six parties to make up for lost time to restore momentum to achieving our agreed common goal: the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula."
Hill himself, speaking earlier on Thursday morning in Tokyo before leaving for South Korea, said he wanted to speed up the process.
'We've really fallen behind...'
"We have to catch up on some of the timelines because we've really fallen behind this spring," he said, without revealing his plan to visit Pyongyang.
"I think we have to do everything that we have to do to accelerate the timelines."
A South Korean foreign ministry official told AFP that Hill would return to Seoul on Friday and brief officials on his trip.
His trip is the first to North Korea by a senior State Department official since his predecessor James Kelly went there in October 2002.
It comes amid a sharp rise in hopes of disarming North Korea, which tested an atom bomb for the first time last October, triggering global outrage and UN sanctions.
At six-nation negotiations in February, North Korea agreed to disable its nuclear programmes in exchange for major aid and diplomatic benefits.
But a row over its funds in a Macau bank, frozen because of US sanctions, blocked any progress for four months.
Hill announced earlier this week that the assets, of more than $20m, had finally been returned through a complex transaction involving the US and Russian central banks.
Last Saturday the North said the cash row was almost settled. It invited UN nuclear inspectors to discuss procedures for a shutdown of Yongbyon reactor, the first step under the February pact.
The reactor produces the raw material for bomb-making plutonium.
The UN inspectors will arrive on Tuesday, Hill has said. A follow-up team from the International Atomic Energy Agency will be sent within weeks to verify the actual shutdown.
Hill also predicted that the six-nation disarmament talks - which involved China, Japan, the two Koreas, Russia and United States - would resume within weeks.
- AFP
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