North Korea will allow a team of UN nuclear watchdog officials to visit the Yongbyon reactor it has agreed to shut down under a disarmament-for-aid deal, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Wednesday.
The IAEA delegation headed by Olli Heinonen, the Vienna-based agency's nuclear safeguards director, is already in Pyongyang, capital of the secretive communist state, to negotiate conditions for inspectors to monitor the shutdown. "Tomorrow, we're going to Yongbyon," Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted Heinonen as saying. He said the team would return to Pyongyang on Friday.
An IAEA spokesman confirmed the trip to the reactor, the source of bomb-grade plutonium for North Korea which conducted its first nuclear test last year, would go ahead on Thursday.
Pyongyang expelled IAEA inspectors in December 2002, walked out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty shortly afterwards and, in 2005, announced it had atomic bombs. A diplomat close to the IAEA said that if Heinonen's team finalised terms for an inspector mission, the agency's 35-nation board of governors would hold a one-day special meeting - probably on July 9 - to ratify the deal. Inspectors would then be immediately deployed to North Korea.
North Korea may have fired a short-range missile off its east coast on Wednesday, South Korea's Yonhap news agency said. A Seoul Defence Ministry official could not confirm the report. "We have signs that North Korea fired a short-range missile into the East Sea (Sea of Japan) off the coast ... at around 11:30 this morning (0230 GMT), and we're running a close analysis on that," Yonhap quoted a government source as saying.
North Korea has fired at least two short-range missiles over the past month, but officials in Seoul and one in the North played down the launches, saying they were part of regular military drills.
While the IAEA inspectors were doing their work, Washington would also seek to independently check whether North Korea shuts down the Yongbyon reactor, the US military commander in the Pacific region said.
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