Jailed US student released by North Korea
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NORTH Korea has released Otto Warmbier, an American serving a 15-year prison term with hard labor for alleged anti-state acts, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said yesterday.
The announcement came as former NBA player Dennis Rodman paid a return visit to Pyongyang.
“At the direction of the president, the Department of State has secured the release of Otto Warmbier from North Korea,” Tillerson said in a statement. “Mr Warmbier is en route to the US where he will be reunited with his family.”
The statement offered no other details and made no mention of Rodman’s visit. But it noted that the State Department is continuing “to have discussions” with North Korea about the release of other American citizens jailed there.
Rodman has said he did not plan to raise the fate of the Americans during his visit.
The statement said the department would have no further comment on Warmbier, citing privacy concerns.
In March 2016, North Korea’s highest court sentenced Warmbier to 15 years in prison with hard labor for subversion as he tearfully confessed he had tried to steal a propaganda banner.
Warmbier, 22, a University of Virginia undergraduate, was convicted and sentenced after a one-hour trial in North Korea’s Supreme Court.
The US government condemned the sentence and accused North Korea of using American detainees as political pawns.
The court held that Warmbier had committed a crime “pursuant to the US government’s hostile policy toward (North Korea), in a bid to impair the unity of its people after entering it as a tourist.”
North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the US-backed South Korean government to take control of the Korean Peninsula.
Before his trial, Warmbier had said he tried to steal a propaganda banner as a trophy for an acquaintance who wanted to hang it in her church. That would be grounds in North Korea for a subversion charge. He identified the church as Friendship United Methodist Church.
North Korea announced Warmbier’s arrest in late January 2016, saying he committed an anti-state crime with “the tacit connivance of the US government and under its manipulation.”
In a tearful statement made before his trial, Warmbier told reporters in Pyongyang he was offered a used car worth US$10,000 if he could get a propaganda banner and was also told that if he was detained and didn’t return, US$200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable donation.
Warmbier said he accepted the offer because his family was “suffering from very severe financial difficulties.”
Warmbier also said he had been encouraged by the university’s “Z Society,” which he said he was trying to join. The magazine of the university’s alumni association describes the Z Society as a “semi-secret ring society” founded in 1892 that conducts philanthropy, puts on honorary dinners and grants academic awards.
In the past, North Korea has held out until senior US officials or statesmen arrived to personally bail out detainees, all the way up to former President Bill Clinton, whose visit in 2009 secured the freedom of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
In November 2014, US spy chief James Clapper went to Pyongyang to bring home Matthew Miller, who had ripped up his visa when entering the country and was serving a six-year sentence for espionage, and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been sentenced to 15 years for anti-government activities.
Jeffrey Fowle, a US tourist from Ohio detained for six months around the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a US government plane. He left a Bible in a club hoping a North Korean would find it, a criminal offense in North Korea.
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