Seoul says the leaders of South Korea, China and Japan will not meet for trilateral talks in Kuala Lumpur next week on the sidelines of an annual summit of regional leaders.

Presidential spokesman Kim Man-soo said Sunday that the 'chair country' of the proposed trilateral meeting had informed Seoul that the talks would be postponed to an 'opportune time' after consideration of the current geopolitical atmosphere.

Leaders from the three countries have held trilateral meetings on the sidelines of the ASEAN-plus-3 summit for the past nine years.

But prospects for this year's meeting were thrown into doubt after Chinese premier Wen Jiabo previously said he would not meet with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Malaysia due to Koizumi's past visits to the controversial Yasukuni war shrine.

Koizumi's repeated pilgrimages to the shrine, which pays homage to Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals, has elicited umbrage and condemnations from South Korea and China, former victims of imperial Japan's wartime aggressions

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