Foreigners are regularly forced to make dramatic, falsified televised confessions in North Korea for relatively minor crimes.
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While most tourists to North Korea are from China, roughly 6,000 Westerners visit annually, although the United States and Canada advise against it. Most visitors are curious about life in the reclusive state and ignore critics who say their dollars prop up a repressive system.
Warmbier was arrested while visiting the country with Young Pioneer Tours, an agency specialising in travel to the North, which is strongly discouraged by the USA state department. “His detention was completely unjustified and the sentence North Korea imposed on him is an affront to concepts of justice”, Kasich said.
Otto Warmbier was arrested by police in the communist state after attempting to take the banner from his hotel in the nation’s capital, Pyongyang.
Otto Warmbier has been sentenced to 15 years of hard labour.
It comes at a time of particularly high tension between North Korea and the rest of the world.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un has threatened “indiscriminate” nuclear attacks against the U.S. and the South, and has said his country will soon test a nuclear warhead.
The United States has no diplomatic or consular relations with the North, and the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang provides limited consular services to U.S. citizens detained there.
Prior to the court date, he made a media appearance in North Korea weeks before his trial, where he apologized for stealing a banner from a staff-only area of the hotel where he was staying.
According to Warmbier’s statement, he took the banner with a political slogan on it as a trophy for a church member, who was the mother of a friend.
“Since my family is suffering from very severe financial difficulties, I started to consider this as my only golden opportunity to earn money”, he was quoted as saying.
Otto Warmbier, a 21-year-old U.Va. undergraduate hailing from Wyoming, Ohio, was arrested in January for allegedly “perpetrating a hostile act” against the regime.
Mr Richardson has previously been involved in negotiations to secure the release of Americans from North Korea detention.
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Jeffrey Fowle, another US tourist from OH detained for six months at about the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a USA government plane.
