Hundreds of South Koreans planning to visit North Korea Monday canceled their trips after Pyongyang cut off the last inter-Korean communications channel to protest South Korea's war drill with the United States, Yonhap News Agency reported Monday.
North Korea's military warned earlier in the day that it was immediately cutting off a military hotline with South Korea, the only inter-Korean communications channel that remained open after a number of others were closed by Pyongyang in protest against Seoul's hardline policy.
South Koreans are allowed to cross the border only after notification of their trip is first sent to North Korea through the military hotline.
The North said the communications channel will remain closed until the 12-day joint exercise by South Korean and U.S. forces ends on March 20.
"Our government will put priority on the safety of our citizens in preparing measures to deal with (the closure)," Seoul's Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyoun said.
About 700 people scheduled to visit a joint industrial complex developed by South Korea in the North Korean border town of Gaeseong canceled their trips Monday, he said.
It is not known whether North Korea will allow the 572 South Koreans currently visiting the Gaeseong complex to return to the South. Starting at 3 p.m., 242 of them are scheduled to return, officials said.
"The military hotline does not work now, but we are trying to reach North Korea about whether the border trip is entirely impossible," a ministry official said, requesting anonymity. He said the South Korean visitors may not be able to return "in an extreme case."
The complex in Kaesong, several kilometers north of the inter-Korean border and near the west coast, is a major economic project built after the first South-North summit in 2000. It joins South Korean capital and technology with North Korea's cheap but skilled labor.
More than 90 South Korean firms operate in Gaeseong, producing kitchenware, watches, clothes and other labor-intensive goods and employing some 38,200 North Korean workers. Their combined output reached $251.4 million last year, up 36 percent from $184.8 million in 2007.