N.Korea funds freed as nuclear deadline nears By Jonathan Thatcher 1 hour, 18 minutes ago SEOUL (Reuters) - The United States said on Tuesday that Macau authorities have unblocked funds in frozen North Korean accounts and urged Pyongyang to work toward shutting down a nuclear reactor by a weekend deadline.

The reclusive state has insisted it will only close the reactor, which supplies it with weapons-grade plutonium, once $25 million dollars in funds linked to North Korean interests and frozen since 2005 in Macau’s Banco Delta Asia are freed. Under an international deal agreed two months ago to end its nuclear weapons program, North Korea has until Saturday to start shutting down its Yongbyon atomic plant. “I will let the Macanese authorities speak to how they want to put it, but the bottom line is that they have unblocked these accounts and the account holders can — authorized account holders can — withdraw the funds from those accounts,” U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington. A Banco Delta Asia spokesperson said the relevant account holders were free to do as they wished with the money. “We’ll be dealing with the money according to the requests of the customers,” said Joe Wong, a spokesperson for Banco Delta Asia. “If we get approached by customers who want to take the money out, they can do as they like.” The funds were frozen after Washington accused the Macau bank of being involved in money laundering. Furious that the money still had not been freed, North Korea walked out of a round of six-country talks on its nuclear program in March, five months after its first atomic test. ‘CONCERN’ ABOUT SATURDAY DEADLINE The U.S. announcement came as top U.S. officials visited both sides of the divided Korean peninsula. “We welcome the step (by Macau authorities), we think it’s a fair step and we think it’s now time to get back on denuclearization,” Christopher Hill, chief U.S. negotiator with North Korea, told reporters in Seoul. “This is precisely what they wanted, which was to have the accounts in BDA made available to the authorized account holders. Asked if he thought the Saturday deadline for North Korea to shut down Yongbyon will be missed, Chinese nuclear envoy Wu Dawei, speaking after he met Hill in Seoul, told reporters: “There is that concern.” The State Department stopped short of demanding outright that North Korea meet the deadline and suggested it might not be possible to shut Yongbyon safely by Saturday. “I know that you are bumping up against the technical ability to do that safely,” McCormack said. “We’ll see where we are on Saturday. We think that … everybody should act in such a way that they intend to meet the 60-day deadline.” New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is in North Korea to receive the remains of six U.S. soldiers killed during the 1950-53 Korean War. NBC television reported North Korean officials had told Richardson that once the money was released, U.N. nuclear inspectors, expelled in 2002, would be allowed back in. A February 13 agreement between the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States gave Pyongyang 60 days to shut its nuclear facilities in return for energy aid.

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