Beijing ? North Korea on Saturday denied that it has a nuclear weapons program and said U.S. assertions that it has a secret program to turn highly enriched uranium into material for nuclear bombs are based on “false information.”

A senior North Korean envoy issued the denial as the latest round of six-nation talks on Pyongyang’s nuclear programs drew to a close amid what a Chinese diplomat described as an “extreme lack of trust.”

A contretemps over language prevented the delegates from North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States from signing a final document, which they left China, the host nation, to issue.

The four days of talks ended with widely differing interpretations of the outcome. A senior U.S. official described them as “very successful,” but Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said, “Differences, even serious differences, still exist.” The talks are set to resume by July.

The North Korean Embassy later summoned reporters for a rare news conference in which Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan made comments that included acknowledgment that North Korea has sold missiles to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

“We earned hard currency from Pakistan by selling missiles,” Kim said in Korean, speaking through an English interpreter seated beside him at a table under portraits of Kim Il Song, the deceased founder of communist North Korea, and Kim Il Jong, his son who now governs a nation so isolated it’s known as the Hermit Kingdom.

The interpreter initially spoke of North Korea’s “nuclear dealings” with Pakistan, but it was unclear if she misspoke. Kim later spoke of “broad relations with Pakistan politically, economically and in different efforts.”

Kim, who was the senior North Korean envoy to the six-nation talks, said his nation had “no relationship at all with Pakistan with regard to HEU,” or highly enriched uranium, which can be used to make nuclear weapons.

“We have no HEU,” Kim said. “We have no facilities, sites or technologies related to the HEU program.”

The Bush administration, Kim said, “based this assertion on false information.”

Last week, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate intelligence committee that the Bush administration believes North Korea “is pursuing a production-scale uranium enrichment program based on technology provided by A.Q. Khan,” the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program.