Officials from South Korea's Red Cross on Friday travelled to North Korea for the third round of family reunion talks in as many weeks, amid diminishing optimism about a positive outcome, dpa reported. In the previous talks, also held in the border town of Kaesong, Red Cross officials from the divided Koreas failed to agree on a venue to restart reunions of families separated following the 1950-53 Korean War. The last reunions were held a year ago, according to the Unification Ministry in Seoul. The talks, which came a day after inconclusive military talks - the first in two years - represent a a cooling of tensions between the two Koreas, which had spiked after the March sinking of a South Korean warship, which killed 46 sailors. Seoul blames Pyongyang for the sinking, but North Korea has denied involvement, and at the end of May, it broke off ties with its neighbour. North Korea proposed the Red Cross talks, followed by the South Korean Red Cross' announcement that it would send rice and cement to the North to help it recover from flooding in August. Tens of thousands of Koreans were separated by the Korean War and the subsequent division of the Korean Peninsula. From 2000 to 2007, about 16,000 were reunited at more than a dozen family reunions held at Kumgang Mountain on North Korea's east coast. After a two-year break, one more reunion was held last year. The latest focused on whether the next reunions would continue to take place at the mountain. North Korea wants the South to resume tourist operations at the resort, which bring much needed foreign currency to the impoverished Stalinist state, before reunions can resume there, the South's Yonhap news agency said. Seoul banned cross-border tours a fatal shooting of a South Korean tourist by North Korean soldiers in 2008. Yonhap said South Korean officials were sceptical whether the North's latest conciliatory gestures were genuine or just aimed at a temporary thaw coinciding with the emergence on the official stage of Kim Jong Un, the apparent successor to his father, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.
