South Korea said the move would be unhelpful when the talks resume in Beijing on Tuesday while the North vowed to snub Tokyo over the abductions, whose victims were used to train North Korean spies.

South Korea's point man on North Korea, Unification Minister Chung Dong-Young, said that nothing should be on the agenda other than Pyongyang's nuclear weapons programs.

"The six-party talks should be aimed at denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear arsenal," Chung told the Hankyoreh newspaper in an interview published on Wednesday.

"We have to understand clearly what the six-party talks are all about. It won't be helpful to achieve this goal if we raise the issues of disarmament (of conventional weapons), human rights or kidnapping," Chung said.

Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) meanwhile attacked Japan for taking an "extremely egoistic and double-dealing" stand, warning that it would not deal with Japan on the issue.

"The real purpose sought by Japan through the six-party talks is to bring up the already settled 'abduction issue' ... in a bid to create an atmosphere unfavorable for the DPRK (North Korea)," the agency said.

Japan has so far "stood in the way" of the talks, it said. "The negative role played by Japan at the previous rounds of the talks compels the DPRK not to deal with Japan even if the talks are resumed," it said.

North Korea kidnapped at least 13 Japanese up until the 1980s to train its spies.

Five victims and their families were allowed to return after Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi flew to Pyongyang in 2002 and offered aid in exchange for their freedom.

Japanese leaders and the public have increasingly called for economic sanctions to punish Pyongyang but Koizumi has refused, saying that both "dialogue and pressure" are needed in dealing with the communist regime.

The fourth round of thus far inconclusive talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions will resume in Beijing on July 26.

Pyongyang broke off the talks in June 2004, rejecting a US offer then on the table which required an up-front pledge to dismantle all nuclear programs before getting energy and other assistance.

President George W. Bush on Tuesday said he hoped new six-party crisis talks this month would make North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il see "common sense" and abandon his nuclear weapons drive.

"We're sincere about working with China and South Korea and Japan and Russia to bring some common sense to the leader of North Korea," said Bush.

In Tokyo, the US ambassador to Japan reiterated that Washington also believes the abductions are a secondary question at the nuclear talks.

"The issue of nuclear weapons is not the only issue that the United States has with North Korea. There are all sorts of issues, and the abductee issue is one of those that we have great concerns" over, Thomas Schieffer said.

"But the first thing we've got to do is to get nuclear weapons off the Korean Peninsula," he said.

Schieffer said all nations in the talks -- China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States -- had an interest in finally seeing progress in the nuclear talks.

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