Seoul - Communist North Korea has agreed to resume talks with the United States over its nuclear weapons programme, after a meeting with a US official last week, an official said on Monday.
Pyongyang also reiterated its readiness to resume stalled six-way talks on its programme, but without preconditions, an unidentified spokesman was quoted as saying by state news agency KCNA.
The agreement to bilateral talks came after Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan met with US special envoy to North Korea Stephen Bosworth in New York on Thursday.
The two sides agreed that a “peaceful negotiated settlement of the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula” was in their mutual interest, the official was quoted as saying.
North Korea was also “unchanged in its stand to resume the six-party talks without preconditions at an early date,” the official said.
Pyongyang has issued several similar statements on the six-way talks between the United States, Russia, China, Japan and North and South Korea since they stalled in 2008.
But US State Department spokesman Mark Toner on Thursday repeated the position that Pyongyang “needs to take concrete steps towards denuclearisation” to honour a 2005 agreement before the multilateral talks could resume. The talks broke down because North Korea insisted on pursuing further weapons tests.
Two weeks ago, North and South Korean nuclear representatives met for the first time since the breakdown of the six-way talks.
Bosworth was expected to travel to South Korea, China and Japan in coming weeks to discuss the results of his meetings with Pyongyang officials and possible next steps to revive the six-way process, the South Korean Yonhap News Agency quoted anonymous diplomatic sources as saying.
No timeframe was given for the next round in the agreed US-North Korean bilateral talks. - Sapa-dpa