UN watchdog head to visit North Korea

VIENNA, Feb 23 (Reuters) The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, said today he would visit North Korea after receiving an invitation from the government there to discuss the freeze of North Korean nuclear facilities.

''According to the letter, they would like to improve and normalise the relationship with the agency and hope to go back to being a member of the agency,'' ElBaradei told reporters in Vienna after meeting U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

North Korea agreed on February. 13 to take steps towards nuclear disarmament in exchange for 300 million dollars in aid under a deal US President George W Bush hailed as the best chance to get it to scrap its atomic weapons programme.

The landmark agreement, reached four months after Pyongyang stunned the world with its first nuclear test, requires the secretive communist state to shut down the reactor at the heart of its nuclear ambitions and allow international inspections.

The accord also calls for concessions by the United States towards economically impoverished North Korea which Bush once lumped together with Iran and Iraq as an ''axis of evil''.

A top South Korean nuclear envoy said earlier today North Korea appeared ready to abandon the source of its weapons-grade plutonium but there was a still a long way to go before Pyongyang scraps its entire nuclear arms programme.

Chun Yung-woo, Seoul's chief envoy to six-way talks, said under the deal reached in Beijing, the faster and farther North Korea went toward shutting down its sole operating nuclear reactor and reprocessing facilities, the more aid the impoverished state would receive.

REUTERS SAM RK2152