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South and North Korea on Sunday agreed to hold talks this week to ease access to a jointly run industrial estate just north of the heavily fortified border, officials said.

The South's defence ministry said Seoul had accepted the North's revised offer to hold the talks on Tuesday at the Kaesong estate in North Korea.

The talks are supposed to discuss ways to improve transport and communications links to the estate, where about 42,000 North Koreans work at more than 110 South Korean-funded plants.

Both sides had been at odds, with the South first preferring to hold the meeting at Panmunjom, a truce border village, on February 23, while the North later demanded that it be rescheduled for March 2 in Kaesong.

Broader diplomatic efforts have been intensifying to revive talks aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear programme. The frozen dialogue groups the two Koreas, Japan, China, Russia and the United States.

North Korea's military on Thursday accused South Korean and US troops of planning a surprise attack as the two countries prepare joint exercises, and said it could respond with atomic weapons.

Cross-border military tensions have run high since a Yellow Sea firefight last November left a North Korean patrol boat in flames. In late January, the North fired some 370 shells into the sea near the disputed maritime border.

Agreeing to the North's revised offer for talks, the South's defence ministry said on Sunday a non-military official would lead the southern team to Tuesday's discussions in Kaesong.

Both sides had pushed for colonel-led military talks.

"Being headed by a unification ministry official, the meeting should be called an 'inter-Korean working-level' contact, not a military one," a defence ministry spokesman told AFP, without elaborating.

AFP