North Korea Sentences a U.S. Student 15 Years’ Labor

An American student was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for subversion on Wednesday, news agencies reported. He was accused for trying to steal a political propaganda poster in his hotel in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

Otto F. Warmbier, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, apologizing at a news conference last month after being accused of trying to take a political banner from a hotel in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Kyodo, via Reuters

The student, Otto F. Warmbier, 21, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, was convicted after a one-hour trial Wednesday morning at the country’s Supreme Court, according to The Associated Press, which has a bureau in Pyongyang. The Japanese news agency Kyodo and the Chinese state-run Xinhua agency also covered the conviction and sentencing. There was no immediate report from North Korea’s state-run news media.

The sentence is the latest penalty that North Korea has meted out to a small number of American tourists, missionaries and journalists in recent years for what have been deemed antistate crimes, including accusations of illegal entry and leaving a Bible behind in a hotel.

Mr. Warmbier was detained on Jan. 2 as he was about to board a plane to leave North Korea. In late February, he offered a tearful apology at a government-arranged news conference in Pyongyang, where he said he had tried to take the political poster as a trophy for a member of a church in the United States. It was impossible to determine whether Mr. Warmbier had been coerced into making the statements.

The reports on Wednesday came less than a day after a longtime American diplomat, Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, met with two North Korean officials in New York to urge Mr. Warmbier’s release on humanitarian grounds.

Source : The New York Times

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