N Korea insists on end to US sanctions

"The lifting of sanctions is not something needed to keep negotiations alive, but something that should be implemented as promised," said Kim Gye-Gwan, North Korea's chief delegate to the talks.

Kim was speaking to reporters as he prepared to leave Beijing after three days of talks on his country's nuclear ambitions that also involving China, South Korea, the United States, Japan and Russia.

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After the talks ended Friday, Kim said it would be impossible to make progress in negotiations on dismantling its nuclear program unless Washington lifted financial sanctions against the North Korean companies.

He was referring to an announcement by the US government on October 21 that it had blacklisted eight North Korean entities as proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and frozen whatever assets they had under US jurisdiction.

The action also prohibited all transactions between US citizens and the entities, the Treasury Department said.

North Korea's position, which it has voiced since Friday, is that the sanctions violate a joint statement issued by the six parties at the end of the previous round of talks on September 19.

"To lift sanctions is not something to be implemented conditionally, but something already agreed on," Kim said Saturday.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Yong-Il, who has been intimately involved in earlier six-nation talks, sounded a similar note in Pyongyang, speaking to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.

"Only if the parties concerned make joint efforts based on respecting the spirit of the common statement and fulfil the reached consensus, progress can be made on the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula," he said.

South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Song Min-soon, his nation's chief delegate at the talks, said Saturday in Beijing he expected the problem could be solved.

"Both sides (the United States and North Korea) know about the problem, so I believe things will go well," Song told AFP.

Even so, North Korea's decision to raise the sanctions issue at the end of the talks Friday could threaten to bring the talks back to stalemate.

"We have seriously proposed the US should lift financial sanctions on us," Kim, the North Korean negotiator, said Friday. "We came out for negotiations because the US said it would stop its hostile policy and co-exist with us."

Aside from the US sanctions against the eight North Korean companies, operations at a bank in Macau were also recently closed down for allegedly doing business with North Korean companies, after a US investigator raised concerns of counterfeiting and money laundering.

The US delegation told the North Koreans the sanctions had nothing to do with the talks and instead restated its demand that Pyongyang immediately and irreversibly begin dismantling its nuclear weapons programme.

As delegation chief Kim arrived at the Sunan Airport near Pyongyang later Saturday, he told Xinhua that trust was important for the talks to continue.

"The parties concerned should eliminate suspicion and establish trust for each other if they really want to make progress in the talks," he was quoted as saying.