An American student has been sentenced to 15 years hard labour for the “subversive act” of trying to steal a political propaganda poster in his hotel in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
Otto Warmbier, 21, a University of Virginia undergraduate from Cincinnati, was convicted after a one-hour trial at the country’s Supreme Court, according to The Associated Press, which has a bureau in Pyongyang.
The sentence is the latest penalty that North Korea has meted out to a small number of American tourists, missionaries and journalists in recent years for what have been deemed anti-state crimes, including accusations of illegal entry and leaving a Bible behind in a hotel.
Warmbier, who entered North Korea as part of a tour group, was detained on January 2 as he was about to board a plane to leave the country. In announcing his arrest, North Korea’s state news media said Warmbier had visited with the intent of “bringing down the foundation of its single-minded unity.”
The charges against him claimed that the CIA, a secretive American university organisation and a member of a church in Ohio together encouraged him to commit the “hostile act” of stealing a political poster from a wall in his hotel.
In late February, Warmbier sobbed and pleaded for his release at a government-arranged news conference in Pyongyang, where he admitted to stealing the poster and said that the church member had offered to buy him a used car worth $10,000 in exchange. “I made the worst mistake of my life,” Warmbier said.
A video clip posted on CNN correspondent Will Ripley’s Twitter account showed a sobbing Warmbier saying: “I have made the worst mistake of my life, but please act to save me.”
He said a “deaconess” had offered him a used car worth $10,000 if he could present a US church with the slogan as a trophy from North Korea.
The acquaintance also said the church would pay his mother $200,000 if he was detained by the North and did not return, KCNA quoted Warmbier as saying.
“My crime is very severe and pre-planned,” Warmbier was quoted as saying, adding that he was impressed by North Korea’s “humanitarian treatment of severe criminals like myself”.
It was impossible to determine whether Warmbier had been coerced into making the statements. Some American detainees who have spoken at similar news conferences in Pyongyang later said, after being freed, that they had been forced to confess to crimes and to apologise.
