SEOUL (AFP) ? North Korea has agreed to hold further talks with the United States in a bid to end the deadlock over its nuclear disarmament, the communist state's official media said Tuesday. The report by the Korean Central News Agency follows a meeting in Geneva last week between US and North Korean nuclear negotiators. The agency said the two sides had "an in-depth discussion" in Switzerland on their differences over a six-nation disarmament deal. "Both sides agreed to sit face-to-face with each other and continue the discussion to seek ways of solving the problems arising in implementing the above-said agreement in the future, too," it added. North Korea last year signed a landmark deal to scrap all of its nuclear programmes in exchange for badly needed energy aid and major security and diplomatic benefits. Under the current phase, the six parties set a December 31, 2007 deadline for the North to disable its main plutonium-producing atomic plants and to declare all of its nuclear programmes. But the US says the North has still not answered questions about an alleged covert enriched uranium weapons programme and about possible nuclear cooperation with Syria. The North denies both allegations. The chief US nuclear negotiator, Christopher Hill, said last week he had a "very good" meeting with the North Koreans but without any breakthrough. The six-party talks, which began in 2003, group the United States, the two Koreas, China, Russia and Japan. They assumed added urgency after the North tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006.
