North Korea visit 'cleared the air', says UN nuclear chief

The head of the UN nuclear agency has put a positive gloss on a visit to North Korea which he said had "cleared the air" despite his failure to meet the top North Korean nuclear negotiator as originally scheduled.

Mohamed ElBaradei had played down expectations about the outcome of his talks in Pyongyang, which were the first by the International Atomic Energy Agency since the expulsion of UN inspectors four years ago.

The talks had been seen as a first confidence-building visit aimed at rebuilding trust between the North Koreans, who broke out of the nuclear treaty and carried out their first nuclear weapons test last October.

"The trip cleared the air. It created a positive environment for our future relationship," he said on returning to Beijing after an overnight stay in the reclusive hardline communist state.

During the visit, he met three officials, including the head of the North Korean atomic energy agency. But the chief nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan, was unavailable. Mr ElBaradei said he had been told he was sick.

The North Koreans had invited Mr ElBaradei to Pyongyang on 23 February, under an agreement which had been reached at the last round of six-party negotiations last month.

"The agreement is still quite fragile, precarious, so I hope all parties will ... continue to solidify that agreement," Mr ElBaradei said. The February agreement was reached at negotiations in Beijing in which China, the United States, South Korea, Japan and Russia worked to convince the North to scrap its atomic programme.

Mr ElBaradei said that North Koreans had told him they were "fully committed" to the deal but wanted American financial sanctions lifted before it would mothball its main Yongbyon reactor.

They would then be "ready to work with the agency to make sure that we monitor and verify the shutdown" of the reactor which is believed to have produced the plutonium for the nuclear weapon North Korea detonated in a test blast on 9 October.

The United States said that within 30 days of the deal on 13 February it would settle a dispute over financial restrictions stemming from North Korean bank accounts frozen in Macau that Washington says Pyongyang used to launder illegal earnings.

The US Treasury yesterday acted in line with the deadline, announcing steps that would allow Macau authorities to decide whether to release an estimated $8m (£4.1m) to $12m in the frozen bank accounts.

That should now open the way for North Korea to shut the Yongbyon reactor and re-admit the UN inspectors.

The six-party deal, reminiscent of a 1994 US-North Korean pact which later fell apart, provides for the North to eventually receive a million tons of heavy fuel oil for abandoning all its nuclear programmes.