North Korea’s Supreme Court has sent another USA citizen to prison, sentencing a Korean American man to 10 years in prison and hard labor over espionage charges.
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In March 2016, American student Otto Frederick Warmbier was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for taking down a political slogan from a hotel in Pyongyang.
Kim started espionage in 2013 after coming into contact with several South Koreans who tasked him with collecting top party, state and military secrets of the DPRK, including its nuclear facilities, nuclear tests and photographs of warships as well as other information, inside the DPRK. The South’s main spy agency has said it had nothing to do with Kim.
“The North Korean announcement distorted the recent mass-defection case as an ‘abduction’ carried out by the South”, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification (MoU) spokesperson Jung Joon-hee said Friday.
The KCNA account also accuses Mr. Kim, who allegedly went by the code name “Northeastern Tiger”, of having tried to track down Lim Hyeon-soo, a Korean-Canadian pastor who last December was handed a life sentence of hard labor for committing “anti-DPRK religious activities”.
In his conversation with the TV network, which was observed by North Korean officials, Kim said it was time “for the USA government to drop its hostile policies against North Korea”.
Kim Dong Chul is pictured being brought to North Korea’s Supreme Court in Pyongyang in handcuffs.
Kim Jong-un is pictured being surrounded by adoring soldiers of a women’s artillery unit in North Korea’s southeastern province of Kangwon.
Both Russia and China see the deployment as exceeding what is necessary to defend against any North Korean threat, while Wang said it would “directly affect strategic security of Russia and China”. The country has also been using American detainees in order to extract high-profile visits from the United States. From there, he said, he would travel daily across the border to Rason, a special North Korean economic zone.
About 28,000 American troops are deployed in South Korea to deter potential aggression from North Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. Some foreigners previously arrested have read statements of guilt they later said were coerced.
North Korea experienced two failed intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) launches on Thursday, provoking a United Nations protest amid growing concerns that the North will conduct yet another missile test and a fifth nuclear test shortly.
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The evaluations came in defiance of UN Security Council sanctions that have been reinforced after North Korea’s a space rocket launching the next month and last nuclear test in January.
