The chief US envoy to nuclear disarmament discussions with North Korea said he had "good" talks in Pyongyang, Xinhua news agency reported this morning at the end of Christopher Hill's surprise visit to the isolated state.
The most senior State Deparment official to visit the North Korean capital in nearly five years, Hill pushed Pyongyang to live up to a February deal to shut its source of bomb-grade plutonium in exchange for aid.
"It's ... a very good discussion," Xinhua quoted Hill as saying.
However, a Pyongyang diplomat in Vienna raised the prospect of further delays to implementation of February's disarmament-for-aid deal, saying an impasse over North Korean funds frozen in a Macau bank had not been resolved.
Hill met North Korea's Foreign Minister, Pak Ui-chun, and its nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan, during his visit of about 24 hours, Xinhua said.
He landed in South Korea this morning, officials said, and was due to go on from there to Japan.
Washington said Hill's trip to Pyongyang was meant to test "the proposition that North Korea has made that strategic decision to dismantle ... and give up their nuclear programmes".
At the last high-level visit of a State Department official, in 2002, envoy James Kelly confronted the North with evidence Washington said pointed to a covert uranium enrichment programme.
The crisis following that confrontation led North Korea to expel UN nuclear inspectors and culminated in the communist state's first nuclear test last October.
North Korea said last weekend it would re-admit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as required under the February accord struck at six-party talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
That followed signs that most of the $25 million in North Korean funds frozen in a Macau bank for nearly two years for suspected links to illicit activity by Pyongyang was making its way back to the North.
But a North Korean diplomat in Vienna, home of the IAEA, said Pyongyang had not yet received the money.
"So our side has informed the IAEA that we have no objection to them preparing the visit as a plan, but we are not ready to give our official confirmation for the visit as scheduled by the agency," said Hyon Yong-man, counsellor at the embassy in Vienna.