TOKYO, Sept 3: North Korea has started to reassemble its main nuclear facility, making good on threats after the United States failed to remove the communist state from a terrorism blacklist, reports said on Wednesday.

North Korea last November began disabling its reactor and other plants at Yongbyon, some 90km north of Pyongyang, under US supervision as part of a six-nation disarmament-for-aid deal.

But North Korea has now started putting the nuclear facility back together, Japan’s Kyodo News and US cable television network Fox News reported.

Kyodo News, quoting unnamed diplomats in Beijing, said North Korea began the work on Tuesday.

Officials declined comment on the reports.

“We don’t know anything about it,” Japan’s top government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura told reporters.

North Korea on August 26 announced that it had stopped disabling its nuclear plants and would consider restoring them.

The United States says the North must accept strict procedures to verify a declaration it made in June of its nuclear activities before it can be taken off the blacklist, which blocks US economic aid.

“The US is gravely mistaken if it thinks it can make a house search in the DPRK as it pleases just as it did in Iraq,” a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said in the August 26 statement, using the country’s official name.

US President George W. Bush famously branded North Korea as part of an “axis of evil” but last year agreed to the six-nation deal that aims eventually to establish diplomatic ties between Pyongyang and Washington.

But Pyongyang, which tested an atom bomb in 2006, in its statement questioned the value of the talks, which group the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan.

In Tokyo, the US delay on the delisting has been seen as a way to pressure North Korea to do more to address Japanese concerns over the regime’s kidnappings of Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s.—AFP