Little is known on status of US student held in North Korea
CINCINNATI — There’s been little public word about what has happened to an American college student detained in North Korea, as a new administration takes over one year later amid deep U.S. concerns about the hostile country’s nuclear and missile development.
North Korea announced last Jan. 22 it had detained Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old University of Virginia student from suburban Cincinnati, earlier that month for alleged anti-state crime. Warmbier, who had visited North Korea with a tour group, was sentenced in March to 15 years in prison at hard labour after a televised tearful public confession to trying to steal a propaganda banner.
Such North Korean detentions of U.S. citizens for offences that might seem minor to outsiders — Warmbier said he wanted to take the banner home for a woman in Ohio who wanted to hang it in her church — are seen in Washington as having political motives, and Warmbier’s has come during a time of worsening tensions.
The State Department calls the sentence “unduly harsh,” and spokesman John Kirby said in a statement last week in response to an Associated Press query that the department continues to work for Warmbier’s “earliest possible release.” Noting that he has gone through North Korea’s criminal process and been detained more than year, he said: “We continue to urge the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea) to pardon him and grant him special amnesty and immediate release on humanitarian grounds.”