US and North Korea restart talks on nuclear plant stand-off

NEGOTIATORS from the United States and North Korea held a rare face-to-face meeting in Beijing yesterday, amid a flurry of contacts between delegations on the eve of six-nation talks aimed at persuading the isolated communist country to relinquish its nuclear programme.

Individual meetings between envoys from the two Koreas, the US, hosts China, Japan and Russia took place as the group prepared to resume talks today after a gap of more than a year over demands that the North give up nuclear development.

The US and North Korean delegates met behind closed doors at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in the Chinese capital for about 75 minutes, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The American Embassy did not immediately release details of the meeting, but the US envoy, assistant secretary of state Christopher Hill, said earlier that the two sides were "just trying to get acquainted, review how we see things coming up and compare notes".

He did not say what progress Washington hopes to make.

Mr Hill said he did not expect the meetings this week to be the concluding set of negotiations on the Korean nuclear dispute. The last round of six-nation talks ended in June 2004 without major progress towards a settlement of the dispute, which erupted in late 2002 when the US said that North Korea had admitted running a nuclear programme in violation of an earlier agreement.