N.Korea has helped arm 6 Mideast nations: Israel

VIENNA (Reuters) - Israel accused North Korea on Saturday 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 U.N. 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 program.

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.

SIX COUNTRIES

"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 behavior 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.

Iran is under IAEA investigation over intelligence allegations of secret atomic bomb research. Syria is under IAEA scrutiny over U.S. reports it almost built a plutonium-producing reactor before Israeli warplanes bombed the site a year ago.

Iran and Syria, adversaries of Israel, deny the allegations. Libya scrapped a covert nuclear arms program in 2003.

U.S. envoy Chris Hill ended three days of meetings in North Korea on Friday meant to salvage the collapsing denuclearization deal, calling the talks substantive but not saying if he swayed Pyongyang to give up plans to restart its nuclear complex.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she would talk Hill on Monday when they are both back in Washington. She spoke with him by phone on Friday.

"But one thing was very clear. The North Koreans have an obligation to give a verification protocol ... that gives confidence that we are able to verify the provisions of the declaration that North Korea made" about its nuclear program, she said at a news conference in New Delhi.

(Editing by Giles Elgood)