North Korea puts nuclear monitors' return on hold

North Korea said on Thursday a planned visit by UN nuclear monitors was on hold because it had not received unfrozen bank funds, shaking hopes Pyongyong would start disabling its atom bomb programme soon.
But Russia said later the $25 million, released as part of North Korea's nuclear disarmament deal with five powers, was on its way to a North Korean account in a bank in Russia. "All the North Korean funds are being transferred to a bank on Russian territory right now, as I speak to you," Russian deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Kiselyak told a news briefing.
The funds transfer will be completed on Friday, Itar-Tass news agency quoted a Russian diplomatic source as saying, contradicting a US account on Tuesday that the funds apparently had already gone through.
North Korea refused to honour its February 13 disarmament pact with five powers - the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia - until the money was transmitted to it from Macau's Banco Delta Asia with US assistance.
The transfer was delayed for months because of many other banks' unwillingness to take the money due to a US Treasury blacklist of the Macau bank for handling what it then called illicit North Korean funds. The disarmament accord was struck four months after reclusive communist North Korea said it had detonated a nuclear test device and four years after it expelled UN inspectors and walked out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Earlier on Thursday, US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill began a surprise visit to North Korea a few days after it hinted it would start carrying out nuclear disarmament and allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to verify this.
But the signs of movement in a long stalled process faltered when North Korea's embassy in Vienna, headquarters of the IAEA, said Pyongyang had not received any of the $25 million. "So our side has informed the IAEA that we have no objection to them preparing the visit as a plan, but we are not ready to give our official confirmation for the visit as scheduled by the agency," said Hyon Yong Man, counsellor at the embassy.
The IAEA had said on Monday the trip by IAEA safeguards directors, designed to agree details for a return of inspectors expelled in 2002, would go ahead next week. An unidentified North Korean diplomatic source had been quoted on Monday by Russia's Interfax news agency as saying the North would seal its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, source of its bomb-grade plutonium fuel, in the second half of July.
Officials in Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo said they had no information about the North Korean statement on the IAEA visit. US State Department spokesman Sean MacCormack said he did not know the precise status of the $25 million. But "we've moved beyond the (Macau bank) issue and it now gets down to the business at hand, which is to begin the steps that lead to denuclearisation," McCormack told reporters.
He said Hill's trip to Pyongyang was meant to test "the proposition that North Korea has made that strategic decision to dismantle ... and give up their nuclear programmes. Hill said earlier the six-party talks, under which the impoverished country would receive hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, would likely resume in early July.