NKorea remains on terrorism list: Christopher Hill

Sydney, Sept 4: Top US nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill today rebuffed North Korea's claim that Washington has agreed to remove Pyongyang from a list of states that sponsor terrorism, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported.

''No, they haven't been taken off the terrorism list,'' Hill said in Sydney, which is hosting the annual meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He came to Sydney from Geneva, where he met North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan.

''Their getting off that list will depend on further denuclearization,'' Hill, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs, told reporters in Sydney.

Hill declined to elaborate.

''I don't want to get into all the details of it. We had some private diplomatic discussions, we had some understanding of how we go forward.'' Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency yesterday quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying the United States agreed to take North Korea off its blacklist of nations that sponsor terrorism during the talks in Geneva.

North Korea was put on the list in January 1988 after the bombing of a South Korean airliner the preceding year over the Indian Ocean that killed all 115 people on board.

North Korea said it agreed in talks at the weekend in Geneva with the United States to take ''practical measures to neutralise the existing nuclear facilities in the DPRK (North Korea) within this year,'' KCNA quoted the Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

''In return for this, the US decided to take such political and economic measures for compensation as delisting the DPRK as a terrorism sponsor and lifting all sanctions that have been applied according to the Trading with the Enemy Act,'' the unnamed spokesman was cited as saying.

Hill said in Geneva at the weekend that the communist state had agreed to fully account for and disable its nuclear programme by the end of the year but he did not say what, if anything, he had offered in return for the latest pledge.

The blacklist imposes a ban on arms-related sales, keeps the economically isolated country from receiving US economic aid and requires the United States to oppose loans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions.

REUTERS>