UNITED NATIONS — The State Department’s intention to remove North Korea from a list of countries that support terrorism is criticized in a newly released nonpartisan congressional report that cited “reputable” sources saying the communist regime of Kim Jong Il has supported Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers and the Lebanese Hezbollah group, both of which have long been on America’s list of terror groups.

As part of a new diplomatic opening toward North Korea, the State Department has cited a long-held position in Washington that Pyongyang “was not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since 1987.” But the Congressional Research Service report, released Tuesday, cited French, South Korean, Israeli, and Japanese sources to bolster claims that the communist regime’s aid to the two terror groups is recent, including support that helped Hezbollah in its war against Israel last year.

In one recent publication cited by the authors of the congressional report, a professor at South Korea’s Yonsei University, Moon Chung-in, said Israel’s external intelligence agency, the Mossad, “‘partially blames North Korea’ for the effectiveness of Hezbollah’s missile strikes into Israel” in the 2006 confrontation marked by the largest attack on civilian populations in the history of Israel’s wars.

The South Korean professor, who has had access to Western and Korean intelligence material as part of his service as adviser to President Roh, has reported that “‘vital missile components’ of Hezbollah missiles fired into Israel during the 2006 war came from North Korea,” and that “the missiles with North Korean components were assembled in Iran and were transported to Hezbollah in Lebanon via Syria.”

A September 2006 French publication has also reported about “details of an extensive program by North Korea to provide arms and training to Hezbollah,” which started in the late 1980s with a Pyongyang visit by the organization’s officials, who received “training courses” in the North. With Iran as facilitator, the cooperation intensified later as North Korean trainers went to Lebanon to guide Hezbollah in developing “extensive underground facilities for storing arms, food, and medical installations,” according to the French report cited in the congressional paper.

Another cited report, from the Japanese press, details deliveries of conventional arms “including machine guns, automatic rifles, and anti-tank rocket launchers,” to the Tamil Tigers.

The Bush administration might seek to link the removal of North Korea from the list of terror sponsors “strictly with progress on the nuclear issue,” according to the congressional report.

Nevertheless, it argues, doing so “could damage the integrity of the list of state sponsors of terrorism,” and “limit the ability of the United States to deal with what appears to have been into 2007 a rising level of North Korean support for international terrorist groups.”