Israel accuses North Korea of Mideast proliferation

VIENNA, Austria -- Israel accused North Korea on Saturday of covertly supplying at least half a dozen Mideast countries with nuclear technology or conventional arms.

The allegation was made at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna where world powers urged the North to stop reactivating its nuclear weapons program.

"The Middle East remans on the receiving end of the DPRK's reckless activities," Israeli delegate David Danieli told the meeting, referring to North Korea by its acronym.

"At least half a dozen countries in the region ... have become eager recipients" of the North's black market supplies of conventional arms or nuclear technology, he said -- mostly "through black market and covert network channels."

While he did not name any of the suspected countries, he appeared to be referring in part to Iran and Syria, which are both under IAEA investigation, and Libya, which scrapped its rudimentary weapons program after revealing it in 2003.

U.S. officials have said that North Korea's customer list for missiles or related components going back to the mid-1980s also include Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

The Israeli accusations came the day after U.S. chief nuclear negotiator Christopher Hill returned from North Korea where he had hoped to salvage a disarmament pact.

The North recently reversed a process to dismantle its nuclear facilities as it agreed to do under the pact. The State Department said Friday that the communist nation was continuing work to restore those facilities even after Hill's visit.

According to U.S. officials and outside experts, North Korea has sold its military goods to at least 18 countries, mainly in Africa and the Middle East and in mostly covert transactions.

North Korea's catalog has included ballistic missiles and related components, conventional weapons such as mobile rocket launchers, and nuclear technology.

U.S. government officials have said that A.Q. Khan -- the Pakistani scientist who confessed in 2004 to running an illegal nuclear market -- had close connections with North Korea, trading in equipment, facilitating international deals for components and swapping nuclear know-how.

In 2004 then-CIA director George Tenet testified before Congress that North Korea had shown a willingness "to sell complete systems and components" for missile programs that have allowed other governments to acquire longer-range missiles.

Concerns about Iran focus on its refusal to scrap a secretly developed uranium enrichment program that could be retooled to produce fissile warhead material. Tehran is also suspected of hiding past efforts to develop a nuclear weapons program and of basing its Shahab-3 missile on a North Korean model.

Iranian officials say the missile has a range of 1,250 miles -- enabling a strike on Israel and most of the Middle East. U.S. and other intelligence says Tehran has studied modifying Shahabs to carry a nuclear warhead -- something Iran denies.

Rejecting any suggestion of North Korean aid, Iran's chief IAEA delegate Ali Ashgar Soltanieh told The Associated Press that Iran's nuclear and missile programs were developed "without the help of any other country."

Syria surfaced on the IAEA's radar screen after Israeli warplanes last year destroyed what the U.S. says was a partially built reactor of North Korean design that -- when completed -- was meant to produce plutonium.

Both Syria and Iran -- which is under U.N. sanctions for its nuclear defiance -- deny having weapons ambitions.

Diplomats have told The Associated Press that the IAEA has been forwarded intelligence that outlines years of extensive cooperation between the Syrians and teams of visiting North Korean nuclear officials.

North Korea tested a nuclear device in an underground explosion in 2006. The North is believed by experts to have produced enough weapons-grade plutonium to make as many as 10 nuclear bombs before agreeing to dismantle its weapons program early last year.

North Korea had been disabling its nuclear facilities at its Yongbyon complex but abruptly stopped in mid-August, citing Washington's refusal to remove it from a list of state sponsors of terrorism.

The disarmament process snagged over Washington's request that the North agree to a verification system to account for its nuclear arsenal as a condition for removing the country from the terrorism list.

In Vienna, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea urged the North to honor its pledge to disarm and the 145-nation IAEA general conference then passed a resolution expressing the same sentiments.

The disarmament pact was agreed between six countries -- North and South Korea, the U.S., Japan, China and Russia.