Former US President Bill Clinton Arrives in Pyongyang

Former US President Bill Clinton (file photo)

North Korea's official news agency says former U.S. President Bill Clinton has arrived in Pyongyang, on an apparent mission to negotiate the release of two detained American journalists.

The Korean Central News Agency says Mr. Clinton was greeted at the airport Tuesday by the vice-president of North Korea's parliament and the regime's chief nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye Kwan.

American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling have been held in North Korea since March for illegally crossing into North Korea over the Chinese border. They were arrested while reporting on North Korean refugees in China, near the North Korean border.

Lee and Ling were sentenced in June to 12 years of hard labor. They also were charged with committing hostile acts against the North Korean government.

These undated photo show American journalists Laura Ling, right, and Euna Lee (File)

The two women were reporting for San Francisco-based television news outlet Current TV, co-founded by Al Gore, Mr. Clinton's former vice president.

The Obama administration had initially proposed sending Gore to Pyongyang to negotiate for the journalists' release, but the proposal was rejected by the regime.

Mr. Clinton is the highest-profile American to visit North Korea since Madeline Albright, his former secretary of state, who traveled there in 2000.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the former president's wife, has urged Pyongyang to grant amnesty to Lee and Ling.

Relations between the U.S. and North Korea have worsened in recent months over Pyongyang's nuclear test in May, and a series of subsequent test-firings of long and short-range missiles. The nuclear test led to a U.N. resolution imposing a new series of tougher sanctions against the regime.