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North Korea sentences US tourist to 15 years in prison North Korea sentences U.Va. student to 15 years of hard labor in prison
(about 1 hour later)
PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korea’s highest court sentenced an American tourist to 15 years in prison with hard labor on Wednesday for subversion. He allegedly attempted to steal a propaganda banner from a restricted area of his hotel at the request of an acquaintance who wanted to hang it in her church. SEOUL – The University of Virginia student being held in North Korea was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years of hard labor for trying to steal a propaganda sign from a hotel in Pyongyang.
Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old University of Virginia undergraduate student, was convicted and sentenced in a one-hour trial at the North’s Supreme Court. He was charged with subversion. Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old from Cincinnati, Ohio, was convicted after a one-hour trial at North Korea’s Supreme Court, China’s Xinhua news agency, which has a bureau in Pyongyang, reported Wednesday. Japan’s Kyodo News and the Associated Press also reported the verdict.
No further details were immediately available. North Korea’s state media had not commented on the case by 2 p.m. local time.
Warmbier was arrested as he tried to leave the country in early January. He was in North Korea as a tourist with a New Year’s tour group. [U-Va. student held in North Korea ‘confesses’ to ‘severe’ crime]
In a statement made before his trial, he told a gathering of reporters in Pyongyang he tried to take the banner with a political slogan on it as a trophy for the mother of a friend who said she wanted to put it up in her church. Warmbier is being held at a particularly sensitive time, when annual military drills between the United States and South Korea are coinciding with international sanctions against North Korea’s regime to punish it for its recent nuclear test and missile launches.
North Korea announced the arrest in late January, saying he committed an anti-state crime with “the tacit connivance of the U.S. government and under its manipulation.” North Korea always protests the joint military drills in South Korea because it sees them as a pretext for an invasion, but Pyongyang’s reaction is particularly ferocious this year because the allies are practicing “decapitation strikes” on North Korea’s leadership and taking out its nuclear and missile facilities.
Warmbier had been staying at the Yanggakdo International Hotel, which is located on an island in a river that runs through Pyongyang, the capital. It is common for sections of tourist hotels to be reserved for North Korean staff and off-limits to foreigners. Furthermore, the sanctions imposed by the United Nations, coupled with direct measures taken by the United States, Japan and South Korea, are the toughest yet and could inflict a significant amount of pain on the North Korean regime.
In his comments, Warmbier said he was offered a used car worth $10,000 by a member of the church. He said the church member told him the slogan would be hung on its wall as a trophy. He also said he was told that if he was detained and didn’t return, $200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable donation. Warmbier, an economics major, was arrested at Pyongyang airport on January 2, at the end of a five-day tour to North Korea. But it wasn’t until three weeks later that Kim Jong Un’s regime announced it was holding the Ohio native for an unspecified “hostile act” against the state.
Warmbier, from Wyoming, Ohio, said he accepted the offer of money because his family is “suffering from very severe financial difficulties.” [U-Va. student detained in N. Korea described as ‘buoyant,’ inspiring and driven]
In previous cases, people who have been detained in North Korea and made a public confession often recant those statements after their release. Then at the end of February, the North Korean authorities brought Warmbier out for a highly orchestrated press conference in Pyongyang, at which the student confessed to a “very severe and pre-planned” crime.
North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the U.S.-backed South Korean government to control the Korean Peninsula. Reading from hand-written notes, Warmbier said that he had tried to steal a political sign promoting “the [North] Korean people’s love for their system” from the hotel, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
U.S. tourism to North Korea is legal, but the U.S. State Department strongly advises against it. “The aim of my task was to harm the motivation and work ethic of the Korean people. This was a very foolish aim,” Warmbier told the mainly North Korean reporters. He was wearing a beige jacket with a shirt and tie, and was clean shaven.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Previous Americans who have been detained in North Korea have also been brought out to the press to “confess” their crimes, with the detainees told what to say and the reporters told what to ask.
Analysts expect that Warmbier was also directed in this way to deliver the statement, in which the student said he was impressed by North Korea’s “humanitarian treatment of severe criminals like myself.”
Warmbier went on a trip organized by Young Pioneers Tours, one of a handful of travel companies that takes adventurous tourists into North Korea, while on his way to Hong Kong for a financial course for his U.Va studies.
Several United States citizens have been held in Pyongyang in recent years, usually because of activities relating to Christianity, and have also been sentenced to hard labor.
North Korea tries to use them as bargaining chips and releases them after high-profile interventions which it can then use for its domestic propaganda purposes, portraying the visits as Americans coming to pay homage to North Korea.
Former president Bill Clinton went to Pyongyang to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee in 2009, while Jimmy Carter traveled to the North Korean capital the following year to collect Aijalon Gomes, a Boston man who entered the country illegally.
More recently, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, went to Pyongyang in 2014 to free three Americans being held, two of them for Christianity-related “crimes.” In North Korea, where the Kim family has created an all-encompassing personality cult, religion is banned.
At U. Va., Warmbier was selected as an Echols scholar, a special four-year academic program for fewer than 250 students in each class. Those chosen are described as “intellectual risk-takers” who have shown “academic excellence, intellectual leadership, and evidence of the ability to grapple with complex topics,” according to the university’s website.