US President George W. Bush began the delisting in June after the communist state submitted a list of its nuclear programmes. Under US law, the process takes 45 days, which would end Monday and be the earliest the delisting could happen.

But Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told him by telephone that no date had been set to take North Korea off the blacklist.

"I asked her, 'as details on the verification have yet to be decided, can I take it that the delisting won't happen today?' And she said, 'Yes, you can take it that way,'" Komura told reporters.

The United States has not been satisfied that North Korea's declaration is accurate or that measures to verify it are in place.

Dennis Wilder, the US National Security Council senior director for Asian affairs, said Sunday that a delisting on Monday would be "unlikely."

North Korea, which tested an atom bomb in 2006, agreed to end its nuclear programme last year in exchange for badly needed aid and security guarantees. The US delisting would allow the impoverished state to receive US aid and international loans.

The six-nation disarmament deal involves the two Koreas, China, the United States, Japan and Russia.

Japan has taken the hardest line at the talks. It opposed the US delisting due to a row over Pyongyang's kidnappings of Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s to train spies for the regime.

The United States has said that it shares Japan's concerns and that it has pushed North Korea on the abduction row during denuclearisation talks.

Japan and North Korea were meeting on Monday in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang in the latest round of bilateral talks set up as part of the six-nation denuclearisation process.

"This dialogue is aimed at coming up with concrete ways or looking into how to find and return the survivors," Komura said.

After the last bilateral talks, Pyongyang said it would launch a new investigation into the abduction issue, leading Tokyo to lift some of its sanctions against the communist nation.

Opinion polls showed that the decision was unpopular in Japan, where the abduction story strikes a powerful emotional chord.

North Korea has admitted kidnapping 13 Japanese including a schoolgirl whom agents whisked onto a ship from a Japanese beachfront.

Pyongyang returned five victims and their families in 2002 and says that other victims are dead. Japan insists that North Korea is hiding survivors and has abducted more people than it acknowledges.