Ban said Seoul and other participants are working hard to ensure the talks will produce tangible results, such as a communique, when they get underway in Beijing on February 25.

"The government hopes that we will produce visible and positive outcomes from the second round of talks," he told a meeting with journalists ahead of a trip to the Middle East.

"For an instance, it would be nice to have something like a joint statement issued. We continue to work on it."

Ban suggested that participants should designate teams of officials to discuss detailed issues in order to maintain momentum for dialogue.

Ban will travel to Washington from March 3-6 and to Tokyo from March 7-8 for talks with his US and Japanese counterparts to discuss the outcomes of the second round of six-way talks, the foreign ministry said.

The first round, held in Beijing in August 2003, ended inconclusively without any joint statement released.

The new talks will bring the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States to the negotiating table for the first time in six months in a bid to break an impasse to the 16-month nuclear crisis.

The crisis began in October 2002 when the United States said North Korea had admitted running a clandestine nuclear weapons program based on enriched uranium in violation of a 1994 nuclear freeze accord.

Pyongyang has denied the claims by Washington, while reactivating its once-frozen nuclear facilities producing weapons-grade plutomium to cope with what it calls a possible US "war of aggression."

But the Stalinist state has offered to freeze its plutonium-producing facilities if it gets US concessions, including a resumption of energy aid to Pyongyang.

Washington has urged Pyongyang to first abandon all nuclear development activities, including the covert uranium enrichment program, in a verifiable and irreversible manner.

Early this month, Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan admitted earlier this month that he had passed on nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.

US intelligence officials say Pyongyang already has one or two crude nuclear bombs made from plutonium diverted from its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 90 kilometres (50 miles) north of Pyongyang, before 1994.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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