North Korea reopens hotline

By Miyoung Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea reopened a military hotline with the South on Saturday, a day after Washington and Seoul ended annual defence drills Pyongyang had called preparations for an invasion.

The North also confirmed it had detained two Americans on Tuesday for "illegally" crossing its border from China and said they were being investigated.

Washington said on Friday that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was trying to resolve the issue over the two female journalists, who were detained while filming a story for an online news company.

Pyongyang cut the military hotline, the only telephone link between the two Koreas, at the start of the annual U.S.-South Korean drills on March 9. A spokesman for Seoul's unification ministry said it was restored earlier on Saturday.

But the move did not signal the North was ready to tone down its rhetoric ahead of a planned rocket launch early next month.

North Korean media on Saturday called the drills the "biggest manoeuvres for a nuclear war against the DPRK (North Korea) in history in terms of the aggressor forces involved and their duration."

Tension on the peninsula are already running with the North's announcement it would launch a satellite between April 4 and 8.

On Saturday, the North issued a notice to aviators saying it will close two routes in its airspace from April 4 to 8 between the hours 0200 and 0700 GMT for a satellite launch, an official at Japan's transport ministry said.