Photo taken in 1992 showing the Yongbyon-1 nuclear power plant in North Korea (File)
North Korea needs to give "verifiable" answers to U.S. allegations that it helped Syria build a nuclear reactor before it can be removed from a blacklist of state sponsors of terrorism, a top U.S. lawmaker said Thursday.
President George W. Bush's administration has offered to remove North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism, which also includes Syria, as part of a six-party deal aimed at dismantling Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal.
"We would expect to have good, clear, verifiable information from the countries that are involved before steps like that would be taken by the administration," Representative Pete Hoekstra, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters.
Hoekstra and other lawmakers were briefed by U.S. officials behind closed doors on Thursday on charges that North Korea helped Syria build a nuclear reactor at a site destroyed by an Israeli raid in September.
"This is a serious proliferation issue both in the Middle East and the country that may be involved in Asia," Hoekstra said.
U.S. officials gave lawmakers Thursday a video presentation that includes photographs of the Syrian nuclear facility, a top US official said on condition of anonymity.
Another U.S. official, who also requested not to be named, said the reactor could have produced plutonium, potentially to feed nuclear weapons, but was destroyed before it ever began to operate.
Syria denounced the charges, with its Ambassador to the United States pointedly linking the supposed U.S. evidence to Washington's weapons-of-mass-destruction case for invading Iraq.
The allegations were certain to roil six-country diplomatic efforts to get North Korea to come clean on its nuclear and proliferation activities and abandon its atomic ambitions in return for diplomatic and economic rewards.
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