North Korea has been cooperating fully with nuclear inspectors monitoring the shutdown of its atomic complex, the UN team said today.
Meanwhile, a North Korean foreign ministry official promised steps to improve ties with the United States if Washington scrapped its trade ban and dropped North Korea from a list of countries Washington says sponsor terrorism.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) staff arrived in North Korea on July 14 to monitor the Yongbyon nuclear complex, which the North closed as part of a disarmament pact reached in six-country talks in February.
A reactor and uranium fuel processing plant at Yongbyon can produce the plutonium that North Korea used in its first nuclear test-blast in October last year.
"In doing our actions we had complete cooperation from the DPRK authorities," the head of the IAEA group, Adel Tolba, told reporters in Beijing after arriving from Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Tolba would not comment on the state of the North's nuclear facilities; such weighty issues are left to agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who is likely to issue a report on the shutdown in September. But Tolba gave no sign of any problems.
"We think that what we need to perform was performed," he said. "We did perform all the mandated activities."
He said the team was heading back to its Vienna headquarters where an assessment would take place.