The United States recently urged North Korea to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors back into its nuclear facilities, a source close to the six-party nuclear disarmament talks said Tuesday.

Washington also asked Pyongyang to send senior government officials, such as First Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, to the United States for talks with Stephen Bosworth, U.S. special representative for North Korean policy, the source said.

Sung Kim, U.S. special envoy for the six-party talks on disbanding North Korea's nuclear arsenal, urged Pyongyang to allow IAEA inspectors back in the reclusive country to monitor its nuclear activity when he met with Ri Gun, director general of the North Korean Foreign Ministry's North American affairs bureau, in New York on Oct. 24, the source said.

IAEA inspectors involved in monitoring North Korea's main nuclear complex in Yongbyon left the nation in April after being expelled, along with U.S. nuclear experts involved in disablement work at the complex in retaliation for a U.N. Security Council statement condemning North Korea's recent rocket launch.

Washington's request for a senior North Korean official to visit the United States was filed through a recent series of communications between the two sides, the source said.

Also Tuesday, the United States accused North Korea of violating U.N. Security Council resolutions and its own prior nuclear commitments after Pyongyang said it had finished reprocessing about 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods at its Yongbyon nuclear complex as of the end of August.

"Reprocessing plutonium is contrary to North Korea's own commitments," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said. "It certainly runs counter to the commitment that they made in 2005, and it violates U.N. Security Council resolutions."

But Kelly stopped short of condemning North Korea's announcement outright, saying instead that the United States is focused on getting North Korea back to the stalled six-party talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.

"What we're focused on with North Korea is getting to the point where we can re-launch the six-party talks, which will get us our ultimate goal, which is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," Kelly said.

In April, North Korea withdrew from the six-party talks and said it would start reprocessing nuclear spent fuel rods to produce plutonium at the Yongbyon complex, located 90 kilometers north of Pyongyang, in protest against U.N. criticism of its rocket launch earlier that month.

The announcement by Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency came a day after the reclusive nuclear-armed state repeated its call for direct talks with Washington, saying that if the two countries ended their mutual hostility and forged trust, progress could be made toward denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.

In September, Washington announced a plan to seek direct talks with Pyongyang as part of efforts to resume the six-party talks. But the United States is still deciding when and where to have the bilateral talks, Kelly said.

Although Kelly characterized the discussion between the U.S. and North Korean officials as useful, the meeting apparently yielded no agreement on full-scale bilateral talks involving Stephen Bosworth.