Seoul, Dec 19 : US President Barack Obama has proposed setting up a liaison office in North Korea next year in a step to ease tensions between the two rival states, said on Friday.
The offer was in a letter for leader Kim Jong-il that Obama’s first envoy to the secretive state delivered when he went to Pyongyang last week for discussions aimed at reviving dormant nuclear disarmament talks, Yonhap quoted diplomatic sources in Beijing as saying.
North Korea’s official KCNA news agency confirmed later on Friday that the letter from Obama to Kim had been handed to First Vice Minister Kang Sok-ju, considered the mastermind of the North’s nuclear policy, by US envoy Stephen Bosworth on December 9.
It gave no other details Obama said the liaison office could be established if Pyongyang ended its year-long boycott of the talks and returned in the next few months to the discussions with China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States, Yonhap said.
–Agencies