North Korea claims it has arrested U.S. student for ‘anti-state acts’

Pyongyang’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Friday that authorities are investigating the student who it says entered the country as a tourist.

The student was identified Warmbier Otto Frederick by KCNA, the Associated Press reported.

North Korean military posts near the border with South Korea.

The University of Virginia website lists an undergraduate with that name at the McIntire School of Commerce, the university’s business school.

Johnson said Young Pioneer Tours was in contact with Warmbier’s family and USA officials. North Korea would likely respond angrily to any such meeting, and it is unlikely China, the North’s last major ally and biggest aid provider, and Russian Federation, also a traditional ally, would quickly embrace Park’s proposal.

South Korea on Friday vowed to respond to North Korea’s nuclear programme sternly in 2016 after Pyongyang’s nuclear test earlier this month.

But South Korea and the US have said that Pyongyang must first show its sincerity toward denuclearization before such talks can resume.

The six-party talks to denuclearise the peninsula, involving South Korea, North Korea, China, the US, Japan and Russian Federation, were halted since late 2008. Most of the time the detainees are released, sometimes after visits to the country by current or former USA officials. Pyongyang has called its bomb test a necessary measure for self-defense and repeated its desire for the U.S.to offer a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. About 28,500 American troops are also stationed in South Korea.

Young Pioneers, a tourism company marketing itself as the budget option for traveling to North Korea, confirmed that Warmbier was on one of its tours. North Korea is now holding a 60-year-old Canadian pastor, who was last month sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour on sedition charges. The offenses he was charged with included harming the dignity of the North’s leadership and trying to use religion to destroy the North Korean system, according to the North’s state media.