Six-party talks on Korean nuclear issue to resume from Feb. 8

The six-party talks on the Korean peninsular nuclear issue will be resumed in Beijing on Feb. 8, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman announced on Tuesday.

"As a result of the consultations of the parties concerned, the third phase of the fifth round of the six-party talks on the Korean peninsular nuclear issue will be resumed in Beijing on Feb. 8," Jiang Yu told a regular news conference.

The previous phase of talks recessed in December last year after five days of negotiations which produced no breakthrough.

Launched in 2003, the talks involve China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), the United States, the Republic of Korea, Japan and Russia.

The announcement came after a flurry of shuttle diplomacy among relevant parties, particularly the Berlin meeting between U.S. top negotiator Christopher Hill and his DPRK counterpart Kim Kye-gwan in mid-January.

"The various parties have held helpful contacts on how to push forward the talks and implement the joint statement," Jiang said, adding that "these contacts have laid the foundation for the early resumption of the six-party talks."

Jiang said the upcoming talks will be "open-ended" and the duration will depend on the progress of the talks.

"We hope that all parties will continue to demonstrate positive attitudes, strengthen dialogue, enhance trust and fully implement the joint statement as early as possible and realize the goal of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula."

On Tuesday afternoon, Daniel Glaser, U.S. Treasury Department's deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes, held talks with the DPRK officials in U.S embassy in Beijing on the DPRK financial sanctions.

The two sides had three hours of meeting in the U.S. embassy, Glaser told reports at hotel on Tuesday evening.

"Two of the issues have been on the our agenda, the Banco Delta Asia(BDA) and concerns about counterfeiting," said Glaser.

"In the past 18 months, we had gone through over 300,000 pages of documents and everything we have seen in the documents have confirmed we have been saying, that there are really a lot of troubling activities going on at that bank," he said.

Glaser said he hoped the talks would give some opportunities to shed more light upon the issues the U.S. side was concerned about.

"What I think we accomplished today is to establish a framework that will allow us to work more and talk more about this tomorrow and in the days to come," he said.

As for the counterfeiting, Glaser said they brought two experts from the United States secret service to Beijing to describe their investigations on the issue in their financial meeting.

"This is certainly going to be something that we're going to have to keep coming back to," he added.

The bilateral financial talks are the second of its kind, following the first one which held in Beijing in December.

The DPRK delegation led by O Kwang Chol, president of the DPRK's Foreign Trade Bank, arrived in Beijing Tuesday morning for the current financial discussions.

The two sides plan to meet again Wednesday morning in the DPRK embassy in Beijing, said Glaser.

Source: Xinhua