North Korea Refuses to Halt Nuclear Programme

North Korea has refused on Saturday to bring a halt to its nuclear programmes, and told it will continue them until the US drops its "hostile" policy towards it, as well as withdrawing financial restrictions imposed last year.

|PIC1|The prospects of a stabilisation of the region were quickly deflated, with North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan saying he was not optimistic of a breakthrough at talks aimed at dismantling its nuclear programmes, which are due to open in Beijing on Monday between the North and South Korea, China, the United States, Russia and Japan.

Xinhua has quoted Kim as saying: "The United States should change its hostile policy against the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea)."

He added, "The nuclear issues cannot be resolved until the United States take a co-existence policy.

"I'm not optimistic about prospect of the six-party talks because the United States doesn't change its previous stance," he said.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has seemed to urge flexibility ahead of the talks, saying the negotiations were part of a process and could not be judged by one session.

In particular, Rice insisted that UN sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for a 9 October nuclear weapons test would continue to be enforced even if the six-country talks in Beijing showed progress.

Rice did however indicate that there would be a certain degree of flexibility on resolving a dispute over what the US says is Pyongyang's counterfeiting of US dollars and money laundering. The issue led to North Korean accounts at the Macau-based Banco Delta Asia being frozen.

Nuclear negotiations were boycotted by North Korea over a year ago, following the disagreement.