The United States sent a delegation to China on Monday for talks with North Korea about its suspected nuclear weapons plans, and an official said he expected the meeting to go ahead this week as scheduled. A senior State Department official said the delegation led by the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian affairs, James Kelly, departed Washington for Beijing, ending doubts over the talks prompted by a confusing North Korean statement on Friday about reprocessing spent fuel rods. ‘‘We are heading out there and expect to proceed as scheduled. We expect the group will be meeting the N Koreans in Beijing this week,’’ the US official added. A South Korean Foreign Ministry official said earlier today that talks on N Korea’s suspected nuclear weapons plans were likely to go ahead as scheduled this week. North Korea appeared to try to end confusion about the status of its nuclear program by quietly correcting a website version of an English-language statement that had originally said Pyongyang was ‘‘successfully reprocessing’’ nuclear fuel rods, a provocative step in Washington’s eyes. The original statement prompted doubts about whether Washington would proceed with the talks in Beijing, the first at this level since last October. ‘‘As we have already declared, we are successfully going forward to reprocess work (sic) more than 8,000 spent fuel rods at the final phase,’’ the new statement said. It did not explain the change, which was closer to the original Korean. ‘‘The talks are likely to go ahead as scheduled,’’ a S Korean Foreign Ministry official said. The US wants to talk to the N Koreans about closing down its nuclear programs, while N Korea wants assurances the US will not attack it. The South’s Yonhap news agency reported a five-strong N Korean military delegation arrived in Beijing but it was not clear whether it was an advance team for the talks, which are expected to be held Wednesday to Friday. China is taking part, but N Korea and the US differ over its role. Washington has said it wants China to be active. Pyongyang has said China is merely the host. ‘‘The format of talks does not bother Beijing,’’ Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency on Monday. ‘‘It is important for the US and N Korea not to take steps that would increase tensions.’’ US President George W. Bush, who suspended high-level contacts with the N Koreans when he took office in January 2001 and later included Pyongyang in an ‘‘axis of evil’’, said on Sunday he saw a ‘‘good chance’’ multilateral diplomacy would work. (Reuters)
