NKorea reconnects military phone lines, reopens border

SEOUL (AFP)

North Korea Saturday reconnected cross-border military phone lines cut earlier this month and reopened the frontier for South Koreans visiting an industrial complex, officials here said.

The North on Saturday also gave approvals for border crossings by hundreds of South Koreans who wanted to cross to and from the Kaesong industrial estate, it said.

“Border crossings resumed this morning. People are crossing the border into Kaesong,” a Unification Ministry spokesman told AFP.In protest at a joint US-South Korea military exercise, North Korea cut off the phone lines used to authorise crossings to and from the joint industrial estate just north of the border.

The frontier has been intermittently closed since they were switched off on March 9, the day the drill started. The US-South Korean military exercise, which Pyongyang described as a rehearsal for invasion, ended Friday.

An agreement to open the Seoul-funded estate was reached at the first inter-Korean summit in 2000.