Foreign ministers may meet next week on N.Korea

Foreign ministers of the six countries in talks on ending North Korea's nuclear arms programme were expected to hold their first meeting next week at a regional forum in Singapore, a diplomatic source in Seoul said on Friday.

The unprecedented meeting would come as North Korea has released a long-delayed accounting of its murky nuclear plans and the United States has moved to take the communist country off of a State Department terrorism blacklist.

"It is likely that the foreign ministers of the six-party talks (that include the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States) will meet in Singapore," the source told Reuters.

The meeting, tentatively planned for next Wednesday, would likely be an informal gathering that would not result in an agreement, the source said.

The meeting next week of the ASEAN Regional Forum is the only annual event that brings together the foreign ministers of the six countries.

At talks among six-country nuclear envoys held in Beijing earlier this month, the five powers pressed Pyongyang to accept a mechanism to verify the claims it made about its weapons-grade plutonium stockpile.

North Korea pledged at that meeting to complete steps to disable its Soviet-era nuclear facilities by the end of October, as part of a deal it reached with the other five states.

International envoys did not reach final agreement on a detailed guideline of how to verify the North's account of its nuclear activities made last month. But they mandated a working group to draw up the details.