Verification was among the issues discussed during consultations between US envoy Christopher Hill and North Korea's Kim Kye-Gwan, Hill told reporters.

"We are having this kind of consultation in order to make sure everyone understands what we need to get accomplished with the six-party process" expected to resume on Monday, Hill said.

The United States and North Korea differ on what was agreed when Hill made a trip to Pyongyang from October 1-3 to try to save a shaky February 2007 disarmament deal.

After reaching an apparent agreement on verification procedures, the US announced it would drop the communist North from a terrorism blacklist, and the North reversed plans to restart its plutonium-producing nuclear plants.

However, North Korea, which tested an atomic weapon in October 2006, insists it never agreed to samples of atomic material being taken away.

It says the outside verification of its nuclear inventory, submitted in June, will involve only field visits, confirmation of documents and interviews with technicians.

"When we get to verification we want to have a clear road map of how verification is being done," Hill told reporters earlier Thursday after arriving from Tokyo.

"We don't want a situation where, when we get to verification, there is some misunderstanding on what we agreed to."

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said a meeting in Beijing between all six nations involved in talks on the North's nuclear programme aims to finalise a plan allowing for outside verification of Pyongyang's disarmament.

The six-nation talks are expected to resume Monday even though host China has not confirmed the date, South Korea's foreign minister said in Seoul on Thursday.

Yu Myung-Hwan said the six-party meeting -- grouping the two Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan -- would try to clarify arrangements to verify the North's nuclear declaration.

It would also fix timetables for completion of disablement work at the North's Yongbyon complex, and the delivery of the remainder of the energy aid which the other five parties promised as compensation.

Monday's meeting by the six-nation delegation heads will be the first since July, "so it's going to be an important one", Hill said.

"Overall there is an effort on our part, on the part of our partners in the process, to get more specificity than we currently have so that's what we have been working on," Hill said, declining to give details.

An official with North Korea's embassy, reached by telephone, said only that discussions had finished for the day but were to resume on Friday.

"What is important is the six parties, first of all, have to reach a consensus on the sampling and the 'scientific procedure' that the United States and North Korea agreed on," South Korea's Yu said.

The US, Japanese and South Korean nuclear envoys met in Tokyo earlier in the week, agreeing to try to get Pyongyang to commit on paper to a framework for verifying its nuclear disarmament, officials said.

Hill and Kim held a previous round of talks in Singapore last April.

The choice of Singapore as a venue reflects Pyongyang's strategy to put the nuclear issue on a bilateral footing with Washington, said officials in Seoul who were cited earlier by South Korea's Yonhap news agency.

"North Korea has an embassy in Singapore and it also provides the North Korean delegation with various services including financial support," Yonhap quoted a South Korean foreign ministry official as saying.

Singapore and North Korea have had diplomatic relations since 1975.

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