minister says SEOUL, Oct 6, SPA -- North Korea's chief nuclear negotiator expressed a strong commitment to disabling the country's nuclear facilities by year's end, a former South Korean government minister said Saturday after visiting Pyongyang for the summit of the two countries' leaders, ACCORDING TO AP. The North's negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, said Pyongyang wants to disable the Yongbyon nuclear complex «as quickly as possible» under an Oct. 3 agreement with the U.S. and the North's neighbor countries, according to Jeong Se-hyun, a former South Korean unification minister. Jeong, who visited Pyongyang with South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun this week, said Kim made the remark during a chat with him at a farewell lunch North Korean leader Kim Jong Il hosted for Roh at the end of the three-day summit Thursday. In a sign of commitment to the nuclear deal, the North asked Washington to send a team of nuclear experts to visit the country and survey the Yongbyon complex as early as possible, Jeong quoted the North's negotiator as saying. «He told me that the North also even asked the United States to come and disable the facilities,» Jeong told The Associated Press. «I think it shows the North's aggressive attitude» toward the deal, he said. In Washington, the State Department said it would send a team of experts to the North next week to create a plan for future teams to begin the disablement of the Yongbyon complex. The team is set to depart on Tuesday, spokesman Sean McCormack said. Pyongyang shut down the Yongbyon reactor in July after the U.S. reversed its hard-line policy against the regime, the first concrete progress from years of talks that have also included China, Japan, Russia and South Korea. The latest nuclear deal calls for its disablement, which would mark the biggest step Pyongyang has taken to scale back its atomic ambitions. In exchange, Washington offered to «begin the process» of removing Pyongyang from a blacklist of countries sponsoring terrorism. The North has also been promised economic aid from the U.S. and other countries. The deal makes no clear timetable for when the North would be taken off the blacklist, only saying that Washington would take steps to do so «in parallel with» the North fulfilling its obligations. But the North's nuclear negotiator understands that Washington would remove Pyongyang from the blacklist when it finished disabling the facilities, Jeong said without elaborating.
