North Korea: American student charged with ‘hostile act’ confesses to crime

North Korea has presented a detained American student before media in Pyongyang.

North Korea has allowed the world to get its first glimpse of Otto Frederick Warmbier, an American student at the University of Virginia, two months after his arrest.

“I committed the crime of taking out a political slogan from the staff-only area of the Yanggakdo International Hotel”.

An American student who was arrested on charges of carrying out a “hostile act” in North Korea has admitted to stealing a political banner from a hotel in Pyongyang, where he was staying during his visit to the Asian country.

It is not clear if Warmbier’s North Korean jailers forced him to speak, or if he chose to speak of his own volition.

The university said it had no immediate comment other than that it was in close contact with Warmbier’s family.

The statement said, “We had not heard from him during these many weeks, so you can imagine how deeply anxious we were and what a traumatic experience this has been for us”.

The woman also said the church would pay his mother US$200,000 if he was detained and did not return, KCNA also quoted him as saying.

North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the U.S.-backed South Korean government to control the Korean Peninsula.

“As a general practice, North Korea arrests and imprisons people for actions that would not give rise to arrests, let alone imprisonment, in the United States, and there’s little doubt that North Korea uses detention as a tool for propaganda purposes”, he said.

North Korean travel agencies stress that almost all Americans who travel to North Korea return home safely.

A senior pastor at Friendship United Methodist Church in Wyoming, OH, Warmbier’s hometown, said that “he did not know the person identified by Warmbier” as a deaconess. Jeffrey Fowle, another USA tourist from OH detained for six months at about the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a US government plane.

The DPRK’s state media KCNA reported on January 22 that Warmbier had been arrested by the authorities because he entered the country under the guise of a tourist and aimed to undermine the foundation of the country’s single-minded unity.

North Korea also alleges that Warmbier met previous year with a member of Z Society, a secretive philanthropic organization at UVA that is known to paint its “Z” symbol around university grounds.

Warmbier was a finance and operations intern at Finishing Technology, his father’s firm, from June 2010 to August 2013, and helped run a student investment fund at the University of Virginia, according to his Linkedin profile.

Swedish officials have repeatedly declined to comment on whether any efforts to conduct a consular visit with Mr. Warmbier have succeeded.