N Korea allows IAEA team to visit nuclear reactor

TOKYO, June 27 (Reuters) North Korea will allow a team of UN nuclear watchdog officials to visit the Yongbyon reactor it has agreed to shut down under a disarmament-for-aid deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency said today.

The IAEA delegation headed by Olli Heinonen, the Vienna-based agency's nuclear safeguards director, is already in Pyongyang, capital of the secretive communist state, to negotiate conditions for inspectors to monitor the shutdown.

''Tomorrow, we're going to Yongbyon,'' Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted Heinonen as saying. He said the team would return to Pyongyang on Friday.

An IAEA spokesman confirmed the trip to the reactor, the source of bomb-grade plutonium for North Korea which conducted its first nuclear test last year, would go ahead tomorrow.

Pyongyang expelled IAEA inspectors in December 2002, walked out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty shortly afterwards and, in 2005, announced it had atomic bombs.

A diplomat close to the IAEA said that if Heinonen's team finalised terms for an inspector mission, the agency's 35-nation board of governors would hold a one-day special meeting -- probably on July 9 -- to ratify the deal. Inspectors would then be immediately deployed to North Korea.

North Korea may have fired a short-range missile off its east coast today, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said.

A Seoul Defence Ministry official could not confirm the report.

''We have signs that North Korea fired a short-range missile into the East Sea (Sea of Japan) off the coast ... at around 11:30 this morning (0600 ITS), and we're running a close analysis on that,'' Yonhap quoted a government source as saying.

North Korea has fired at least two short-range missiles over the past month, but officials in Seoul and one in the North played down the launches, saying they were part of regular military drills.

INDEPENDENT CHECKS While the IAEA inspectors were doing their work, Washington would also seek to independently check whether North Korea shuts down the Yongbyon reactor, the US military commander in the Pacific region said.

''We will try to verify the shutdown in support of and in coordination with other agencies, including the IAEA,'' Admiral Timothy Keating told reporters in Manila.

The disarmament accord struck by the two Koreas, Japan, Russia, the United States and China in February was stalled for weeks by a dispute over some 25 million dollars of North Korean funds frozen in a Macau bank at Washington's behest.

Pyongyang agreed to implement the deal this week after the money was released.

The ultimate goal of six-party talks is to disable the Yongbyon complex and completely scrap the rest of Pyongyang's nuclear programme in exchange for massive aid, security guarantees and better diplomatic standing.

North Korea's envoy in charge of relations with Japan told Kyodo news agency in an interview that bilateral ties were unlikely to improve while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in office, and there was no point in holding bilateral talks under the six-party forum until key disputes were settled.

''The future of our country's relations with Japan lies with Japan's attitude,'' Song Il-ho was quoted as saying.

''In my personal opinion, there is no outlook (for improved relations) under the current Abe government.'' Abe has said that Tokyo would refuse to give economic assistance to Pyongyang unless there was progress in a dispute over Japanese kidnapped decades ago to help train North Korean spies in language and culture.

REUTERS SYU RN2036