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N Korean nuclear talks at a fork in the road

The US and Japan said there must be real progress when talks on scrapping North Korea's nuclear arms resume this week, warning Pyongyang that only sanctions and isolation lie down the other "fork in the road."

Analysts and officials hold out little hope of a major breakthrough, however, for the negotiations set to formally reopen today.

The talks are between North and South Korea, the US, Japan, Russia and host country China after a gap in negotiations of more than a year.

"I hope the DPRK [Democratic People's Republic of Korea] understands that we really are reaching a fork in the road," Hill told reporters in Beijing yesterday.

"We can either go forward on the diplomatic track or we have to go to a much different track, and that is a track that involves sanctions and that I think ultimately will really be very harmful to the DPRK economy," he said.

For his part, North Korea's envoy, Kim Kye-gwan, urged an end to what he called Washington's hostility towards it.

On his arrival in Beijing on Saturday, Kim also demanded an end to US financial restrictions against it.

The demand is a prerequisite to progress on measures agreed in six-party accords in September of last year.

Hill indicated that Washington was prepared to deal on the issue of financial restrictions.

A separate delegation from the US Treasury Department would also be meeting the North Koreans in Beijing this week, he said.

But both Hill and Japan's envoy, Kenichiro Sasae, said that the focus of the negotiations should be on taking steps to implement the agreement that had already been inked last September.

Meanwhile, Pyongyang has urged Tokyo to investigate the alleged kidnapping of a North Korean by Japan decades ago.

The request has turned the tables in the usual situation.

Japan has long been pressing North Korea for similar information about Japanese citizens it says the North abducted.

The North's Red Cross Society said that Kim Thae-yong, a North Korean linguist at a college on Russia's Sakhalin Island, went missing in 1991 and was presumed to have been abducted by Japan, according to the North's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The North's Red Cross Society in May asked its Japanese counterpart to help find the linguist, but Japan replied early this month that it had failed to determine his whereabouts, KCNA said in a commentary on Saturday.

KCNA expressed deep regret over Japan's attitude and said that its Red Cross Society did not explain a letter, which the agency claims Kim wrote to the North's Education Commission from Hokkaido, four months after his alleged abduction.
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