Agence France-Presse
BEIJING - Envoys to the six-nation North Korean nuclear disarmament talks will "soon" announce an agreement on verifying Pyongyang's weapons declaration, China said as the negotiations resumed here on Saturday.
The talks, which restarted on Thursday after a nine-month hiatus, have focused on reaching agreement on how to verify the declaration North Korea delivered last month on abandoning its nuclear programmes.
The Chinese delegation's spokesman said the six nations, which include North Korea, had reached a "principled consensus" on the issue on Friday, although other envoys appeared more cautious.
The issue is sensitive because it involves foreign inspectors working in North Korea.
"The six parties achieved some progress on the verification mechanism, reaching a principled consensus," China's official Xinhua news agency quoted Qin Gang as saying late Friday.
"The specific consensus will be announced very soon," he added, without elaborating.
However, US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill said working out the verification details could take several days.
"When you start talking on the verification protocol you very quickly go into great detail so it does take a while," Hill told reporters Saturday. "I suspect it will go on for several days."
"We don't want anything unusual," Hill said. "We want things that have been done all over the world."
South Korea's chief envoy Kim Sook said that although a broad consensus had been reached on verification, there was no major breakthrough yet on the technical details.
"There were intense discussions about the verification regime, but nothing has been agreed on yet," Kim said.
The six-nation talks -- which involve China as host, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia -- began in 2003 with the aim of persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear programmes.
But they had not been held since October, as the other parties involved waited for North Korea to give an account of the nuclear programmes it had spent decades developing.
The declaration was a key part of the six-nation disarmament accord reached last year, under which the North agreed to abandon its nuclear programmes in exchange for an array of diplomatic incentives and economic aid.
Envoys said they had also reached a consensus on the key issue of energy aid to Pyongyang and scheduling six foreign ministers' meetings.
The progress came as South Korea's new conservative president Lee Myung-Bak offered North Korea an olive branch Friday after months of hostility, proposing talks on ways to implement summit agreements reached by his predecessors.
The North shut down its Yongbyon reactor -- which produced the material for the nation's historic atom bomb test in 2006 -- in July last year and has continued to disable it in stages.
However North Korea has complained that it has not been given as much of the fuel oil as it had been promised for its action on Yongbyon.
The third and final phase of the disarmament deal calls for the North to permanently dismantle its atomic plants and hand over all nuclear material and weaponry.
In return, it would get more energy aid, restored diplomatic ties with the United States and Japan, and a formal peace treaty to officially end the 1950-1953 Korean War.