BEIJING, July 9: The United States and North Korea agreed here on Saturday to resume multilateral talks aimed at ending Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons drive in what is seen as a significant move to end the two-and-a-half year nuclear crisis gripping the Korean peninsula.

The agreement came at a rare meeting between senior officials of the two sides in Beijing as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the Chinese capital as part of an Asian trip largely to help jumpstart the nuclear negotiations that have been stalled for more than a year.

North Korea and the United States confirmed that the six-party talks which include South Korea, Japan, China and Russia would begin on the week of July 25 in Beijing, which has hosted all three previous rounds of the nuclear meeting.

“North Korea confirmed that the meeting will be held and also agreed that the objective of the talks is denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and they wanted to come to make progress,” a US administration official accompanying Ms Rice told reporters.

North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said Pyongyang agreed to return to the table after ‘the US side clarified its official stand to recognize the DPRK (North Korea) as a sovereign state, not to invade it and hold bilateral talks within the framework of the six-party talks’.

“The DPRK side interpreted the US side’s expression of its stand as a retraction of its remark designating the former as an ‘outpost of tyranny’ and decided to return to the six-party talks,” the agency said in a dispatch monitored in Seoul.—AFP