China told to pressure N. Korea
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson says Beijing has a diplomatic responsibility to make Pyongyang toe the line.
CHICAGO: Otto Warmbier, the US college student imprisoned for over a year by North Korea and sent home in a coma that proved fatal, will be buried in his home state of Ohio.
Sentenced to hard labour for stealing a political poster from a North Korean hotel, the 22-year-old was medically evacuated in a coma last week after nearly 18 months in captivity.
Suffering from severe brain damage, he died on Monday in his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.
President Donald Trump has slammed his detention and eventual death as “a total disgrace”.
Warmbier’s funeral was set to be held yesterday at Wyoming High School, from which he graduated in 2013, followed by his burial in Cincinnati’s Oak Hill Cemetery.
Fred Warmbier had told reporters his son was lured to North Korea, as other US tourists have been, by tour groups run out of China.
“Otto’s a young, thrill-seeking, great kid who was going to be in that part of the world for a college experience and said, ‘Hey, I’ve heard some friends who have done this. I would like to do this.’ So, we agreed to let him do that,” he said.
“They lure Americans, and then they take them hostage and then they do things to them, and that’s what happened to my son.”
Warmbier was arrested as he was about to leave North Korea and sentenced in March 2016 to 15 years of hard labour. After that, his family heard nothing more about his fate.
Then, just before he was to be medically evacuated, the North Korean regime revealed he had been in a coma for much of his imprisonment.
Medical tests did not show what precipitated his injuries, but also found no evidence of the botulism infection North Korea claimed had caused his coma. — AFP