By Ryu Jin
Staff Reporter

A working-group meeting for the six-party talks, aimed at preparing for the full-scale negotiation to resolve the standoff over North Korea’s nuclear programs, will be held on May 12 in Beijing, officials said on Thursday.

Each of the six nations _ the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, China and Russia _ announced they have agreed to start the first working-level meeting as they agreed during the second-round talks in February.

As the closing date and agendas have yet to be fixed, the upcoming get-together draws keen attention over whether it could lead to substantial fruits.

``The closing date has not been decided in advance,’’ a South Korean Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity. ``Very candid and in-depth discussions are expected in the upcoming meeting.’’

The official explained Pyongyang and Beijing first made the proposal for the schedule right after Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, visited China on April 19 to 21 and then was agreed upon amongst the other four participating nations.

Ning Fukui, Beijing’s special envoy for Korean Peninsula affairs, came to Seoul yesterday to discuss agendas of next month’s meeting with South Korean officials.

After meeting today with Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck, who has been the chief Seoul delegate to the previous two rounds of six-party talks, Ning will fly to Washington and Tokyo successively for similar purposes.

The North Korean nuclear impasse erupted in October 2002, when the U.S. claimed that Pyongyang had broken their 1994 nuclear freeze agreement by launching a secret weapons program.

Two rounds of six-party talks hosted by China to smooth out the crisis have so far failed to narrow differences over the U.S. demand and the North’s denial that it was running an enriched-uranium program.

The U.S. wants a complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling (CVID) of all nuclear programs held by the North, while Pyongyang demands a security guarantee and compensation in return for its abandonment of the nuclear ambitions.

jinryu@koreatimes.co.kr