South and North Korea reached a deal yesterday to resume reunions of families separated during the Korean war in a step at improving ties that were chilled by Pyongyang's weapons tests last year.

In their first high-level contact since the North stormed out of a meeting in July, Pyongyang agreed to resume reunions in early May for families separated by the 1950-

1953 Korean War, according to pool reports of the cabinet-level talks held in Pyongyang.

North Korea, angered at Seoul's decision to suspend food aid after Pyongyang defied international warnings and launched missiles in July 2006, cut off the reunions.

There was no report yet on whether the impoverished North, which had asked Seoul to restore food aid, would receive handouts of rice and fertiliser from the South.

The inter-Korean meeting comes

on the heels of North Korea agreeing last month at separate, six-way nuclear talks to begin shutting down its nuclear arms programme in return for up to 1 million tons of fuel oil.

The two Koreas are technically still at war because the Korean War ended in a truce and not with a peace treaty.

Meanwhile, senior US diplomat John Negroponte said yesterday that Washington would still press

North Korea over uranium enrichment despite toning down its allegations that Pyongyang was running a secret programme.

The United States made the explosive allegations in 2002 that North Korea was running a covert uranium programme in addition to its declared plutonium operations, triggering the collapse of a 1994 disarmament deal.

"I think that the judgement as I understand of the intelligence community is that they are very confident that North Korea has had an enrichment programme in the past and they are moderately confident that this programme still continues," said Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, on a visit to Tokyo.

After exhaustive negotiations, the United States and North Korea signed a new six-nation deal last month under which Pyongyang will shut a key nuclear reactor in exchange for fuel aid.