N. Korea has helped arm six Mideast nations

Israel accused North Korea yesterday of providing weapons of mass destruction to six countries in the Middle East that ignored arms-control commitments.

The Jewish state spoke as the 145-nation assembly of the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, adopted a resolution unanimously urging North Korea to reverse steps it has taken to revive its shutdown atom bomb programme.

Israel itself is the target of two hotly disputed Arab-sponsored draft resolutions in the assembly urging it to give up its nuclear arms monopoly in the Middle East, join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and accept full IAEA inspections.

Israel said there were six Middle Eastern countries which had obtained the means to produce doomsday weapons and ballistic missiles covertly from North Korea while ignoring commitments as members of the NPT and other arms-control regimes.

"At a time when the international community concentrates on North Korea's nuclear activities and its non-compliance with safeguards agreements, the Middle East is at the receiving end of North Korea's reckless practices," Israeli envoy David Danieli told the global meeting in Vienna.

"North Korea has long become a source of proliferation of dangerous weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles in the Middle East," he said.

"At least half a dozen countries in the region who do not even pay lip service to control regimes and are acting in bad faith regarding their stated policy and their undertakings regarding non-proliferation conventions have become eager recipients of North Korea mostly through black market and covert network channels." Danieli did not name the six nations.

Western intelligence officials and non-proliferation experts have said that Iran, Syria, Libya and Iraq under Saddam Hussein were believed to have received North Korean military aid, some applicable to mass-destruction weaponry, in the past.

"No due attention is paid to this dark aspect of North Korean behaviour which has become a matter of great concern to my government and others," Danieli said.

He said there was growing evidence that such states were "emulating the dangerous unlawful practices" of North Korea, which left the NPT in 2003 and developed atom bombs.

"(We) call the attention of the international community to these dangerous developments and their consequences," he said.