N. Korea frees U.S. student
Cincinnati parents say son held 17 months now ill, in a coma.
TOKYO — University of Virginia student Otto Warmbier was evacuated from North Korea in a coma after being detained for 17 months, his parents said Tuesday.
A plane carrying Warmbier, 22, touched down in Cincinnati on Tuesday night, after a stop at a U.S. military facility near Sapporo, Japan.
Fred and Cindy Warmbier said they were informed that North Korean officials had told U.S. envoys that Warmbier became ill from botulism sometime after his March trial and fell into a coma after taking a sleeping pill. The Warmbiers said they were told their son has remained in a coma since then.
“We want the world to know how we and our son have been brutalized and terrorized by the pariah regime” in North Korea, they said. “We are so grateful that he will finally be with people who love him.”
There was no immediate confirmation from U.S. officials of North Korea’s version of events — notably whether Warmbier was stricken with botulism, a potentially fatal illness that is caused by a toxin but is not usually associated with loss of consciousness.
“Our son is coming home,” Fred Warmbier said Tuesday morning after Otto Warmbier was evacuated. “At the moment, we’re just treating this like he’s been in an accident. We get to see our son Otto tonight.”
Friends and well-wishers gathered outside a terminal at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport ahead of the anticipated 10 p.m. arrival of the plane carrying Warmbier. Two mobile intensive-care units arrived at the private terminal where his family was awaiting his arrival, and drove onto the tarmac when the plane landed.
Warmbier’s release was announced in Washington by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Tillerson did not discuss Warmbier’s medical condition.
Tillerson called President Donald Trump at 8:35 a.m. Tuesday to inform him that Warmbier was on an airplane en route to the United States, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the details. The last instruction the president left Tillerson was: “Take care of Otto,” the official said.
Warmbier was on a tour in North Korea, on the way to Hong Kong where he was to do a study-abroad trip in January 2016.
But on his final night in Pyongyang, Warmbier apparently went to a staff-only floor of his hotel and attempted to take down a large propaganda sign lauding the regime.
He was charged with “hostile acts against the state,” and after an hourlong trial in March 2016, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor.
He had not been seen in public since. Swedish diplomats, who represent U.S. interests in North Korea because the United States has no diplomatic relations with the country, were denied access to him.
Then suddenly, last week, North Korean representatives contacted U.S. counterparts and told them that the student was in a coma.
Trump was immediately informed and ordered Otto’s medical evacuation, with the agreement of the North Koreans, according to people with knowledge of the process. “This is a Trump-led effort,” one said.
The logistics were in place by Thursday.
Joseph Yun, the State Department’s special representative for North Korea policy, met with North Korean Foreign Ministry representatives in Norway last month, a White House official said. At the meeting, North Korea agreed that Swedish diplomats could visit all four American detainees, who at that time included Warmbier. Yun then met last week with the North Korean ambassador at the United Nations in New York, where Yun learned about Warmbier’s condition.
Yun was then dispatched to North Korea and visited Warmbier with two doctors on Monday, and he demanded the student’s release on humanitarian grounds.
State Department officials are accompanying Warmbier from Sapporo to Cincinnati.
It is not clear how North Korean doctors had been caring for Warmbier while he was in an unconscious state.
In the past, North Korea has held out until senior U.S. officials or statesmen arrived to personally bail out detainees, all the way up to former President Bill Clinton, whose visit in 2009 secured the freedom of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
In November 2014, U.S. spy chief James Clapper went to Pyongyang to bring home Matthew Miller, who had ripped up his visa when entering the country and was serving a six-year sentence on an espionage charge, and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been sentenced to 15 years for alleged anti-government activities.
Jeffrey Fowle, another U.S. tourist from Ohio detained for six months at about the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a U.S. government plane. Fowle left a Bible in a club hoping a North Korean would find it, which is considered a criminal offense in North Korea.