(Updates with South Korean officials on North Korea's position, paragraphs 9-11)

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING, July 9 (Reuters) - Five regional powers will press North Korea into allowing them to check the account it has given of its plutonium production when sputtering disarmament talks open in Beijing on Thursday for the first time in nine months.

The talks have made historic progress, with the North taking the first steps to dismantle facilities that make bomb-grade fissile material.

But the meetings have yet to produce answers on the secretive state's nuclear weaponry, uranium enrichment plans and whether it proliferated technology to the likes of Syria.

The talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States are scheduled to run for three days and several of those countries' nuclear envoys have already arrived in Beijing for meetings ahead of the formal discussions.

Christopher Hill, the chief U.S. envoy, told reporters on Tuesday this round of talks would focus on verifying North Korea's declaration on its nuclear activities.

"Our hope is to produce a verification regime that will lay out the rules for the road," he told reporters in Beijing.

In late June, the North presented a long-delayed account of its nuclear weapons programme that contained information on its plutonium production, but did little to address U.S. suspicions of a secret uranium enrichment programme.

Washington responded by starting to take the state off of its terrorism blacklist, which will remove sanctions that have made it almost impossible for Pyongyang to access international finance.

South Korea's chief envoy Kim Sook predicted a difficult round of talks ahead.

"There are considerable differences in the perception and priority of the important issues, and it's going to need a lot of work," he told reporters after discussions with the North Korean and U.S. envoys.

A South Korean official said the North's top priority appeared to be ensuring the other parties move on with a speedy delivery of economic and energy aid promised under the six-way disarmament deal.

LINGERING QUESTIONS

U.S. officials said they were concerned that lingering questions remained about the North's murky nuclear programme.

South Korea said in a statement that President Lee Myung-bak and U.S. President George W. Bush stressed in a bilateral meeting in Sapporo, Japan that they expected the dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programme including its nuclear weapons.

Impoverished North Korea has been promised massive aid and an end to its international isolation if it scraps its nuclear weapons programme, considered to pose one of the gravest threats to regional security.

"While the five other nations would want to proceed to the final step of North Korea abandoning its nuclear programme, the North is expected to demand more aid from the world in return for answering more question about its nuclear declaration," said Park Young-ho at the South's Korea Institute for National Unification.

The U.S. decision to take the North off of the terrorism blacklist has not sat well with Washington's ally Japan, which wants to hold Pyongyang accountable for kidnapping several of its nationals decades ago and keeping them in the communist state.

Analysts expect progress on a verification mechanism being decided at this round as host China, the North's biggest benefactor, does not want the talks to turn into an embarrassment coming just ahead of it hosting the Olympic Games next month. (Additional reporting by Jack Kim in Beijing, Jon Herskovitz and Kim Junghyun in Seoul, and Edwina Gibbs in Sapporo; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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