North Korea on Wednesday said it had removed thousands of spent fuel rods from its Yongbyon nuclear plant, a key step in a weapons programme causing increasing anxiety in Washington.

Amid fears that Kim Jong-il's regime might try to assert itself by testing a nuclear weapon, North Korea's central news agency quoted the North Korean foreign ministry as saying Pyongyang had “recently completed the process to withdraw 8,000 spent fuel rods from the 5MW experimental nuclear power plant”.