IAEA barred from monitoring N.Korea nuclear complex

Vienna: North Korea on Thursday in a significant step towards scrapping a disarmament pact with five powers barred the UN from monitoring itsYongbyon nuclear complex, a diplomat said.

"The monitors were told that as of today, they are out, no more access permitted to any facilities in Yongbyon. But as of now they are still in their guesthouse on the premises," a senior diplomat close to the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency told Reuters.

The diplomats said the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog was likely to make an announcement later in the day.

North Korea acted exactly two years after its first nuclear weapon test which alarmed the world and spurred crisis diplomacy leading to the groundbreaking disarmament pact in February 2007.

The communist state ousted the monitor team from Yongbyon's plutonium-producing plant, two weeks ago and vowed to start reactivating the Soviet-era facility within days.

The Yongbyon complex includes the reprocessing plant where bomb-grade plutonium can be extracted from spent fuel rods, a fuel fabrication facility and a 5-megawatt reactor.

The nuclear disarmament pact North Korea struck with five regional powers appeared to unravel last month after Pyongyang vowed to rebuild the largely dismantled Yongbyon in anger at not being removed from a US sponsors-of-terrorism blacklist.

Washington said it would take the North off the list, bringing economic and diplomatic benefits, once a system had been agreed to verify its statements on its nuclear programme.

Diplomats had said the next critical step for North Korea towards reviving Yongbyon would be removing IAEA seals from thousands of fuel rods in storage to prepare for reintroducing them into the reprocessing plant.