US envoy returns with nuke documents

US special envoy (L) with boxes of documents at the Korean border. AP

SEOUL, Saturday (AFP) - A US envoy returned today from North Korea, bringing back documents about the communist state's nuclear activities in what Washington described as an important first step for verification. Sung Kim, director of the State Department's Korea office who led a delegation to the North Korean capital Pyongyang on Thursday, returned to the South by land through a joint security area known as Panmunjom, an AFP photographer on the scene said.

He and three others were carrying a total of seven cardboard boxes which contained some 18,000 pages of documents related to North Korea's plutonium programme."We have to take them back and see," Sung Kim told journalists when asked about their contents, seconds after crossing the military demarcation line dividing the two Koreas.

The papers handed by Pyongyang to Sung Kim will be used to help verify an eventual declaration from North Korea on its past nuclear activities, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack has said. The documentation dating back to 1986 consists of operating records for a five-megawatt reactor and fuel reprocessing plant at the Yongbyon complex where the North had produced its stock of weapons-grade plutonium, the State Department said.

"Review of the operating records... will be an important first step in the process of verifying that North Korea's declaration is complete and correct," the State Department said in a "fact sheet". "These documents will be examined thoroughly by a team of US verification and other experts," it said.

In addition to the declared plutonium operation, Washington said the declaration must clear up suspicions about alleged secret uranium enrichment and about suspected proliferation to Syria.