SEOUL, Feb 10: Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan's confession that he sold nuclear weapons technology to North Korea was a lie cooked up by the United States to justify an invasion, Pyongyang said on Tuesday.

Dr A.Q. Khan's confession, made last Wednesday, came three weeks before North Korea is scheduled to join the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea for a second round of talks in Beijing, on Feb 25, to try to end the North's nuclear weapons programme.

In Pyongyang's first reaction, a foreign ministry spokesman said the United States had fabricated Dr Khan's story to derail the nuclear talks and lay the groundwork for an Iraq-style invasion.

"The United States is now hyping the story about the transfer of nuclear technology to the DPRK (North Korea) by a Pakistani scientist in a bid to make the DPRK's enriched uranium programme sound plausible," said the spokesman in a statement published by Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency.

"This is nothing but a mean and groundless propaganda," the spokesman said, adding Dr Abdul Qadeer's disclosures were such a "sheer lie that the DPRK does not bat an eyelid even a bit".

North Korea has long denied it has been pursuing an atomic weapons programme using highly enriched uranium (HEU), as the United States has alleged. US officials said the North Koreans had admitted in Oct 2002 they had such a programme when confronted with evidence.

The confrontation led to North Korea withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and taking plutonium rods out of storage, reactivating a plutonium-based programme that was frozen under a pact with the United States in 1994.

"This is aimed to scour the interior of the DPRK on the basis of a legitimate mandate and attack it just as what it did in Iraq in the end and invent a pretext to escape isolation and scuttle the projected six-way talks," KCNA said of Dr Khan's disclosures. -Reuters/AFP