A ceremony intended to mark the opening of a hospital in North Korea's border city of Gaesong will not be held on Tuesday as initially planned.

The YMCA Green Doctors, a South Korean volunteer medical group, said it had planned to open the clinic in a ceremony on Tuesday, but that the North failed to send invitations, forcing the cancellation of the event. Some one hundred people from the South were scheduled to attend the opening ceremony.

A government official said that the volunteer group waited for the North's invitations until late Monday but received no word from the communist state.

As a result, the official said, additional talks with Northern officials on the matter will be necessary to assay the intent behind Pyongyang's inexplicable cancellation of the event.

The YMCA Green Doctors plans to send four medical staff, including two doctors, to the clinic in the North's Gaesong industrial complex.