North Korea detains fourth US citizen

NORTH Korea has detained another American citizen for suspicion of acts against the state, it said yesterday.

If confirmed, this would make him the fourth US citizen to be held by the isolated country amid diplomatic tensions.

Kim Hak-song, who was detained on May 6, worked for the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology [PUST], the North’s KCNA news agency said.

“A relevant institution of the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the North’s official name] detained American citizen Kim Hak-song on May 6 under a law of the DPRK on suspension of his hostile acts against it,” KCNA said.

A third US citizen, Kim Sang-dok, who was associated with the same school, was detained late last month for hostile acts, according to the North’s official media.

PUST was founded by evangelical Christians and opened in 2010. Its students are generally children of the country’s elite.

The volunteer faculty of PUST, many of whom are evangelical Christians, has a curriculum that includes subjects once considered taboo in North Korea, such as capitalism.

The college is an unlikely fit in a country that has been condemned by the US State Department for cracking down on freedom of religion.

No further details were available about the circumstances related to the arrests of the two men.

The reported detention comes as tensions on the Korean peninsula run high, driven by harsh rhetoric from Pyongyang and Washington over the North’s pursuit of nuclear weapons in response to what it says is a threat of US-instigated war.

North Korea has in the past used detained Americans to extract high-profile visits from the US, with which it has no formal diplomatic relations.

The other two Americans already held in North Korea are 22-year-old student Otto Warmbier and Korean-American missionary Kim Dong-chul, 62.

Warmbier was detained in January last year and sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour for attempting to steal a propaganda banner.

Two months later, Kim Dong-chul was sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour for subversion.