The quality problem stems from a long-running issue at state-run factories in North Korea.
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A Christian missionary has been sentenced to 10 years in one of North Korea’s punitive hard labour camps for alleged “unpardonable espionage”.
The U.S. State Department said it is aware of the media reports about Kim’s sentence.
Tensions on that front have deepened recently after North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test and a long-range rocket launch, which led to the U.N. slapping its toughest sanctions on Pyongyang in 20 years and South Korea and the United States upgrading their annual spring military drills into the biggest they’ve ever held.
If offered to suspend its nuclear tests provided the U.S. stopped its annual military exercises with South Korea which could open the door to talks and reduced tensions. Kim told CNN he used to live in Fairfax, Virginia, and had been in detention for three months.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the country’s main spy agency, has said Kim’s case isn’t related to the organization in any way. North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Su-yong defended his country’s right to have a nuclear deterrent and blamed that the USA drove North Korea to develop such weapons as an act of self-defence.
The US State Department “strongly recommends against all travel” to North Korea and specifically warns of the risk of arrest.
They took off with a total of 70 million North Korean won, a currency for which there is no official exchange rate.
Like Kim, the University of Virginia student Warmbier also gave a confession to global media.
“I explained our government’s intolerance of North Korea’s nuclear weapons … and asked for Iran’s cooperation”, President Park Geun-hye said in televised remarks following talks with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in Tehran on Monday.
The detainment of Americans and other foreign citizens is interpreted by North Korea watchers as the collection of bargaining chips. Instead, it has presented the congress as a chance for the ruling party to boast its achievements and unity in the face of the “U.S. imperialists”.
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The “DPRK is definitely getting more aggressive, more erratic”, he said.
