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| American student Otto Warmbier, center, is escorted at the Supreme Court in Pyongyang, North Korea, Wednesday, March 16, 2016. North Korea's highest court sentenced Warmbier, a 21-year-old University of Virginia undergraduate student, from Wyoming, Ohio, to 15 years in prison with hard labor on Wednesday for subversion. He allegedly attempted to steal a propaganda banner from a restricted area of his hotel at the request of an acquaintance who wanted to hang it in her church. |
PYONGYANG,
North Korea (AP) -- North Korea's highest court sentenced an
American tourist to 15 years in prison with hard labor for subversion on
Wednesday, weeks after authorities presented him to media and he
tearfully confessed that he had tried to steal a propaganda banner.
Otto
Warmbier, 21, a University of Virginia undergraduate, was convicted and
sentenced in a one-hour trial in North Korea's Supreme Court.
The U.S. government condemned the sentence and accused North Korea of using such American detainees as political pawns.
The
court held that Warmbier had committed a crime "pursuant to the U.S.
government's hostile policy toward (the North), in a bid to impair the
unity of its people after entering it as a tourist."
North
Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to
overthrow its government to enable the U.S.-backed South Korean
government to take control of the Korean Peninsula.
Tensions
are particularly high following North Korea's recent nuclear test and
rocket launch, and massive joint military exercises now underway between
the U.S. and South Korea that the North sees as a dress rehearsal for
invasion.
President Barack Obama on Wednesday
imposed new U.S. sanctions on North Korea in response to what the White
House called "illicit" nuclear and ballistic missile tests.
U.S.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Warmbier's sentence was
"unduly harsh" and urged North Korea to pardon him and release him on
humanitarian grounds.
"Despite official claims
that U.S. citizens arrested in the DPRK are not used for political
purposes, it's increasingly clear from its very public treatment of
these cases that the DPRK does exactly that," Toner told reporters,
referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea.
Warmbier's family in
Wyoming, Ohio, could not be reached for comment. Susanna Max, a
spokeswoman for Wyoming City Schools, said last month that the district,
where Otto Warmbier attended school, had been in touch with the family.
She said Wednesday that the district continues "to respect their
privacy" and declines to comment. The University of Virginia also
declined to comment.
Before the trial,
Warmbier had said he tried to steal a propaganda banner as a trophy for
an acquaintance who wanted to hang it in her church. That would be
grounds in North Korea for a subversion charge. He identified the church
as Friendship United Methodist Church. Meshach Kanyion, pastor of the
church in Wyoming, declined to comment Wednesday.
Ohio
Gov. and Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich said in a
statement that Warmbier's was detention "completely unjustified" and
that the sentence was "an affront to concepts of justice."
Bill
Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said he had
met with North Korean diplomats to the U.N. in New York on Tuesday to
request Warmbier's release after the student's parents and Kasich asked
him to intervene. Richardson said he was neither encouraged nor
discouraged by the meeting with the diplomats, who told him they would
relay his request to Pyongyang.
Richardson
said based on past experience, North Korea could release Warmbier after
sentencing, but current U.S.-North Korean tensions could hurt those
prospects.
"My concern now is that the
U.S.-North Korean relationship is in a very low, negative ebb, and I
hope that does not affect a humanitarian negotiation for the release of
Otto," Richardson told The Associated Press.
Trials
for foreigners facing similar charges in North Korea are generally
short and punishments severe.
Warmbier was arrested as he tried to leave
the country in early January. He was in North Korea with a New Year's
tour group.
U.S. tourism to North Korea is
legal. Arrests of tourists are rare but the State Department strongly
advises against such travel.
Further
complicating matters, Washington and Pyongyang do not have diplomatic
relations. The Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang acts as a go-between in
consular issues when U.S. citizens run afoul of North Korean
authorities.
North Korea announced Warmbier's
arrest in late January, saying he committed an anti-state crime with
"the tacit connivance of the U.S. government and under its
manipulation." It remains unclear how the U.S. government was allegedly
connected to Warmbier's actions.
Warmbier had
been staying at the Yanggakdo International Hotel. It is common for
sections of tourist hotels to be reserved for North Korean staff and
off-limits to foreigners.
In a tearful
statement made before his trial, Warmbier told a gathering of reporters
in Pyongyang he was offered a used car worth $10,000 if he could get a
propaganda banner and was also told that if he was detained and didn't
return, $200,000 would be paid to his mother in the form of a charitable
donation.
Warmbier said he accepted the offer because his family was "suffering from very severe financial difficulties."
Warmbier
also said he had been encouraged by the university's "Z Society," which
he said he was trying to join. The magazine of the university's alumni
association describes the Z Society as a "semi-secret ring society"
founded in 1892 that conducts philanthropy, puts on honorary dinners and
grants academic awards.
In previous cases,
people who have been detained in North Korea and made a public
confession often recant those statements after their release.
In
the past, North Korea has held out until senior U.S. officials or
statesmen came 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 local club hoping a
North Korean would find it, which is considered a criminal offense in
North Korea.
