WASHINGTON - Senior U.S. officials huddled Tuesday ahead of a report from Seoul that may implicate North Korea in the sinking of South Korean ship that killed 46 sailors in March.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met privately with the Obama administration's special envoys to North Korea, Stephen Bosworth and Sung Kim. South Korea is expected reveal the results this week of an investigation into the March 26 blast that tore apart and sank the South Korean navy ship near the border with North Korea on March 26. That investigation, and worries about North Korea's nuclear program, will dominate much of Clinton's talks this week and next with leaders in Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul, where she will finish her Asian trip next Wednesday.
South Korea has yet to blame the North officially for the loss of the ship.
North Korea denies involvement, but suspicion has focused on the North given its history of attacks on the South. South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported Tuesday that investigators have obtained traces of explosives found from the warship's wreckage that are identical to gunpowder ingredients of a North Korean torpedo. Yonhap cited an unidentified military official.
The South Korean Defence Ministry said it could not confirm the report, but it said it had collected a stray North Korean torpedo that came ashore off the west coast seven years ago.
Earlier Tuesday, South Korea's main newspapers, including the Chosun Ilbo, also reported that investigators found fragments of a torpedo propeller near the sinking site that appeared to have been part of a Soviet- or Chinese-made torpedo.
In Washington, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters that North Korea must "cease provocative acts, cease acts of aggression that destabilize the region." He also urged the North to follow through on past commitments to abandon its nuclear programs. The United States had been pushing the North to return to stalled six-nation nuclear disarmament talks, but U.S. officials have said the results of the ship investigation will be a major factor in whether those talks are resumed.
The two Koreas remain technically in a state of war because their three-year conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, in 1953. South Korea has said it will take stern action against anyone responsible for the sinking.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak spoke with President Barack Obama by telephone on Monday and discussed the ship sinking.
Also Tuesday, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the top Republican on the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, sent out a request to other lawmakers for support in efforts to return North Korea to the State Department's terrorism blacklist. The North was taken off the list in 2008 in an attempt by President George W. Bush's administration to win a nuclear disarmament deal.
Ros-Lehtinen said in the "Dear Colleague" letter that the North should be put on the list because of the South Korean ship sinking, the North's alleged role in an assassination attempt on a leading North Korean defector in Seoul, and the Israeli foreign minister's recent assertion that North Korea is supplying Syria with weapons of mass destruction.
