Rice wants more transparency from N Korea

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called on Sunday for full transparency from North Korea over its nuclear weapons program amid reports it was secretly aiding Syria develop an atomic weapons facility.

"There are frankly a lot of questions that remain to be answered and we want to be able to answer questions about all aspects of the North Korean nuclear program," she told reporters with her Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) beside her, before their talks on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

"So that's very important," she said as preparations got underway for a round of talks in Beijing among the US, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas beginning on Thursday aimed at ending the North's nuclear weapons program.

The chief US diplomat and Yang discussed issues linked to the six-party talks, a State Department official said.

Rice did not cite the reported North Korean-Syrian links. If true, they could cast a dark cloud over US policy towards Pyongyang, which US President George W. Bush, weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, has hailed as a success.

US and British newspapers have reported that North Korea was secretly helping Syria to develop a nuclear weapons facility.

Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported that elite Israeli forces seized North Korean nuclear material during a raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israeli warplanes bombed it on Sept. 6.

Quoting well-placed sources, it said on Sunday that the commandos seized the material from a compound near Dayr az-Zwar in northern Syria and added that tests of it in Israel showed it was of North Korean origin.

Sean McCormack, spokesman for the US State Department, declined to comment on the Sunday Times report but said Washington was "very concerned about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction around the globe.

"We don't want to see the world's worst weapons get into the world's worst hands," he told the local Fox television network.

"So, we are definitely on this case," he said.

Reports in the New York Times and Washington Post made similar links between North Korea and Syria based on intelligence data supposedly from Israel.

North Korea has denied the claims and insists it is keeping an earlier pledge not to allow the transfer of nuclear materials.

Despite the apparent nuclear proliferation concerns, Rice noted progress in the six-party talks based on a Feb. 13 agreement under which North Korea agreed to end its nuclear weapons program in return for energy aid and diplomatic and security guarantees.

Yang said he and Rice "need to work very hard" on various agreements reached between Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) at their last meeting on the sidelines of the APEC forum summit recently in Sydney. He did not say which issues they had reached consensus on.

Rice and Yang also discussed Iran and climate change.