JAKARTA, April 23: North and South Korean leaders on Saturday continued their highest-level talks for five years, exploring ways of reopening dialogue to resolve Pyongyang’s nuclear crisis on the sidelines of a summit in Jakarta.

In a second day of discussions South Korean Prime Minister Lee Hae-Chan tried to persuade Kim Yong-nam, North Korea’s number two leader, that his country should reopen six-nation dialogue over its atomic ambitions.

The talks on the margins of an Asia-Africa summit were the most senior-level exchanges between the two countries since 2000 when then South Korean President Kim Dae-jung visited North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang.

“We are trying to persuade North Korea to come back to the six-party talks, that’s what we are doing at the moment,” South Korea’s deputy foreign minister, Lee Tae-Shik, told reporters after the 40-minute discussion.

Talks between Pyongyang and the US, South Korea, China, Russia, and Japan aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear arms ambitions stalled last year after three inconclusive rounds.

Efforts to revive the dialogue have taken on a new urgency after the North shut down its only working nuclear reactor and told a visiting US specialist that it planned to use spent nuclear fuel to make weapons-grade plutonium.

Two years ago, North Korea said it unloaded and reprocessed spent fuel from the reactor, producing enough plutonium for six to eight atom bombs.

Concerns have been further heightened by claims that the Stalinist country is planning to test a nuclear weapon.—AFP