Comatose US student released by N Korea
AN American student who fell into a coma while imprisoned in a North Korean labour camp returned to the United States yesterday after Pyongyang allowed him to be flown home, US media reported.
The release of Otto Warmbier, 18 months into a 15-year sentence, came as US President Donald Trump invited South Korea’s new leader, Moon Jae-in, to Washington for talks on the escalating standoff over the North’s nuclear programme.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said earlier in the day that his agency had secured the 22year-old’s release in talks with North Korea and was pushing for three more Americans to be freed.
It was not immediately clear if he had made any concessions.
The news surfaced after flamboyant retired NBA basketball star Dennis Rodman – a former contestant on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show – flew to Pyongyang to resume his quixotic quest to broker detente between his US homeland and Kim Jong-un’s authoritarian regime.
But State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the visit had nothing to do with the release.
Warmbier’s parents, Fred and Cindy, announced his release in a statement to CNN.
“Sadly, he is in a coma and we have been told he has been in that condition since March of 2016,” they said. “We learned of this only one week ago.” “We want the world to know how we and our son have been brutalised and terrorised by the pariah regime” in North Korea, they said.
On arriving at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport, Warmbier had been transferred to a waiting ambulance which had rushed him to the University of Cincinnati Medical Centre for urgent treatment, Fox News reported.
His parents were told he had contracted botulism and had been given a sleeping pill soon after his trial in March last year and never woke.
The New York Times reported a senior US official as saying the authorities had recently received intelligence indicating Warmbier had been repeatedly beaten while in custody.
Warmbier, a student at the University of Virginia, was arrested for removing a political banner from a wall at a North Korean hotel.
He was detained as he was leaving the country with a tour group in January last year. – AFP