DPRK releases US student amid Rodman visit

BEIJING — US college student Otto Frederick Warmbier has been released by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea after more than a year of imprisonment, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Tuesday.

The plane carrying Otto Warmbier has landed in Cincinnati, Ohio, media reported.

“Everybody feels a sense of relief that he is coming back to the United States,” resident Amy Mayer said.

The 22-year-old student from the University of Virginia has been in a state of coma for more than a year after contracting botulism soon after he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in a trial by the DPRK supreme court on March 16, 2016, according to US local media.

Warmbier was arrested and detained by the DPRK

Amy Mayer, Cincinnati resident

authorities at Pyongyang International Airport on his way back home in January last year after he attempted to take a political slogan from a staff-only area in a hotel where he stayed during his tour to the country.

Pyongyang accused him of supporting the US hostile policy against the DPRK and undermining the unity of the DPRK people.

Tillerson said the US State Department continues to have discussions with the DPRK regarding three other US citizens reported detained.

Warmbier’s release came as retired NBA star Dennis Rodman started his five-day visit to the DPRK, a country he had visited four times before, raising speculation whether his nonofficial visit was connected with the release of the detained student.

However, before his arrival in Pyongyang, Rodman told reporters that pleading to free detained US citizens is not the purpose of his visit right now.

Rodman, one of the few Americans to have met the DPRK’s top leader Kim Jongun, came with an assistant and was received by DPRK officials at the Pyongyang International Airport, but he only posed for photographs without talking to the press.

Kim described Rodman as “a friend in a good reason” when they watched a basketball match together in Pyongyang back in 2013. In January 2014, Rodman, on his fourth visit to Pyongyang, played a friendship basketball game and sang a happy birthday song to “his good friend” to celebrate Kim’s birthday.

Beijing said on Wednesday that these events have sent out a positive signal over the Korean Peninsula issue, according to Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang.

He also called for more practical efforts from Washington and Pyongyang to resume dialogue.

Everybody feels a sense of relief that he (Warmbier) is coming back to the United States.”