"This report is full of imagination but groundless in terms of fact," foreign ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a regular briefing.

Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspaper said earlier Tuesday that Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing had conveyed North Korea's request to Rice when the two spoke over the phone last Friday.

North Korea was reluctant to return to six-nation talks aimed at ending a nuclear crisis and instead wanted to hold bilateral talks with Washington to resolve the issues, the Nihon Keizai said.

In February, North Korea said it had nuclear weapons to defend itself and last week announced it had unloaded 8,000 spent fuel rods in a step to building more nuclear weapons amid reports it was preparing to conduct a nuclear test.

Despite rounds of the six-way talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, little progress has been made in efforts to end Pyongyang's nuclear standoff since it erupted in October 2002.

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