Six nations eye North Korea disarmament schedule

BEIJING, July 19 (Reuters) Negotiators seeking to end North Korea's nuclear arms programme were hopeful of ending their latest session in Beijing today with an agreement on a deadline for crippling the North's atomic facilities.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said yesterday North Korea had now shut five main nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. They include a reactor and an atomic fuel reprocessing plant that can extract the plutonium that Pyongyang used for its first nuclear test-blast last year.

Envoys said a chairman's statement by host China at the end of the two-day talks could set a date, possibly the end of 2007, for completing the second disarmament phase, chief U.S. nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said yesterday.

He said the statement was likely to be a ''broad framework'' with ''precise benchmarks'' to be settled in subsequent talks.

The talks have brought together North and South Korea, the United States, Japan, Russia and China since 2003, but concrete progress has eluded them.

But in February, North Korea agreed to close Yongbyon in return for 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, which began moving there from South Korea last week.

Under phase two of that agreement, the North will get 950,000 more tonnes of oil in return for ''disabling'' its atomic facilities and coming clean on its nuclear secrets.

Pyongyang quit the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty after throwing out nuclear inspectors in late 2002.

The first phase of the February agreement was delayed for many weeks by a snarl-up over bank funds North Korea demanded it receive from a Macau bank before shutting Yongbyon.

South Korean envoy Chun Yung-woo has warned of a bumpy road ahead, while Japan's Kenichiro Sasae has underscored the difficulty of persuading North Korea to disclose covert nuclear activities.

Reuters DH VP0740