(Recasts with U.S. State Department confirming meeting)

By Jack Kim

SEOUL, July 18 (Reuters) - Foreign ministers of the six countries in talks on ending North Korea's nuclear arms program will hold an informal first meeting next week in Singapore, U.S. and South Korean officials said on Friday.

The meeting on the sidelines of a regional diplomatic forum follows North Korea's release last month of a long-delayed accounting of its nuclear programs that was met with moves by the United States to take the communist country off of a U.S. terrorism blacklist and to ease some trade sanctions.

U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the gathering on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum would be U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's first meeting with the North Koreans.

"She will attend the informal meeting," he said, but Rice will not hold bilateral talks with the North Koreans.

The gathering of ministers of the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States would not involve negotiations or produce any kind of statements but would "review where the six-party process is," McCormack said.

The United States views such meetings as "useful for the diplomacy," he added.

"The process is moving in the right direction, based on action for action," McCormack said of complex negotiations that began in 2003 aimed at disarming the state in return for energy and economic aid and better diplomatic relations.

The meeting is tentatively planned for next Wednesday, a diplomatic source in Seoul told Reuters.

Next week's ASEAN Regional Forum is the only annual event that brings together the foreign ministers of the six countries and draws the rare regular presence of the top diplomat from reclusive North Korea.

PRESSING PYONGYANG

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak said on Friday he wanted his neighbor to abandon its atomic ambitions.

"North Korea's strategy is reaffirming itself as a nuclear state while we're trying to get it to abandon its nuclear program," Lee, who took office in February, said at the first National Security Council meeting of his presidency.

South Korea is hoping to use the forum to press Pyongyang to respond to its questions about the shooting death of one of its tourists vacationing at a resort in the North by a North Korean soldier, a presidential Blue House official said.

At talks among six-country nuclear envoys held in Beijing this month, the five powers pressed Pyongyang to accept a mechanism to verify the claims it made about its weapons-grade plutonium stockpile.

International envoys did not reach final agreement on a detailed guideline of how to verify the North's account of its nuclear activities made last month. But they mandated a working group to draw up the details.

North Korea was holding out against allowing inspectors to bring in equipment or any kind of sampling as part of their job, a Japanese official said.

The chief U.S. nuclear envoy, Christopher Hill, said what the United States seeks is nothing unusual, amounting to a standard set of activities done routinely to make similar checks. (Additional reporting by Kim Junghyun and Paul Eckert in Washington; Editing by Xavier Briand)

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