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North Korea has said that talks in Berlin this week with the United States over its nuclear programme were positive and resulted in an agreement.
The foreign ministry statement, as quoted by the North's official Korean Central News Agency, gave no details of the reported agreement.
“The talks took place from January 16 to 18 in a positive and sincere atmosphere and a certain agreement was reached there,” a foreign ministry spokesman was quoted as saying.
“We paid attention to the direct dialogue held by the DPRK (North Korea) and the US in a bid to settle knotty problems in resolving the nuclear issue.”
Christopher Hill, the US envoy to six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear programme, met Thursday for the third time in three days with his Pyongyang counterpart in hopes of resuming full-scale negotiations later this month.
Hill had talks with Kim Kye-Gwan at an undisclosed location after six hours of talks Tuesday at the US embassy in Berlin and one to two hours of further discussions Wednesday at the North Korean embassy.
Hill was due to arrive Friday in South Korea and will go on to China and Japan. Along with the United States and Russia, they are the countries involved in the six-party negotiations with North Korea.
Hill was upbeat early Wednesday about his first meeting. “When you have six hours of conversations and you're going to have some more… certainly you can characterise them as useful discussions,” he said.
The six-party talks aimed at convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme were suspended in late 2005 after the North walked out in protest at US financial sanctions imposed on a Macau bank accused of illicit dealings on behalf of Pyongyang.
The talks resumed in December last year — after North Korea carried out its first nuclear test on October 9 — but made no apparent progress.
The North insisted the financial sanctions be lifted before it would discuss nuclear disarmament.
The United States agreed to hold parallel discussions on the financial sanctions. A first round of those talks took place on the sidelines of the last six-party negotiations in Beijing in December.
