Burma announced the release of 8,500 prisoners in a mass pardoning on Tuesday, including dozens of political prisoners and two Christian pastors from an ethnic minority.

Timed to coincide with Burma's traditional new year celebration, 6,000 of those included in the amnesty were reported to be drug offenders, but the number also included 36 political prisoners.

Despite the gesture, two Reuters journalists who have been detained since December under the nation’s colonial-era Official Secrets Act were not included.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo could face 14 years in prison.

They were arrested in December while reporting on Burmese security officers' role in the extrajudicial killings of 10 Rohingya men in Rakhine state, where troops are accused of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Muslim minority.

One of the journalists' lawyers, Khin Maung Zaw, said the men were not released as only those who had been convicted were being pardoned.

Two Christian pastors from the Kachin ethnicity, who had been sentenced to between two and four years in jail after helping journalists report on the destruction of a church by an airstrike in the north of the country, were among those released.

Pastor Dumdaw Nawng Lat, 65, and Baptist youth leader Langjaw Gam Seng, 35, had been convicted of providing support to an ethnic armed group and defaming the military.