US student jailed in NK for crimes against state
Print Edition
NORTH Korea’s highest court sentenced an American tourist to 15 years in prison with hard labor for subversion yesterday, weeks after authorities presented him to media and he tearfully confessed that he had tried to steal a propaganda banner.
Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia undergraduate, was convicted and sentenced in a one-hour trial in North Korea’s Supreme Court.
He was charged with subversion under Article 60 of North Korea’s criminal code. The court held that he had committed a crime “pursuant to the US government’s hostile policy toward the 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.
Tensions are particularly high following North Korea’s recent nuclear test and rocket launch, and massive joint military exercises now under way between the US and South Korea that North Korea sees as a dress rehearsal for invasion.
Before the trial, the 21-year-old from Wyoming, Ohio, said he had 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.
Warmbier was arrested as he tried to leave the country in early January. He was in North Korea with a New Year’s tour group.
In a tearful statement made before his trial, Warmbier told a gathering of reporters in Pyongyang he tried to take the banner as a trophy for the mother of a friend who said she wanted to put it up in her church.
He said he was offered a used car worth US$10,000 if he could get a 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.
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