North Korea arrests U.S. student, cites ‘hostile act’

Meanwhile, a United Nations investigator said on Friday that the world must back a criminal prosecution of North Korea’s leaders as there has been no improvement in human rights there in the two years since a United Nations report detailed Nazi-style atrocities.

A University of Virginia student honored as an “intellectual risk-taker” has been arrested in North Korea, its state-run media said Friday, accusing the American of unspecified “hostile acts” against the state with “the tacit connivance of the USA government”.

Earlier this month, CNN reported that North Korea had detained another US citizen on suspicion of spying.

Warmbier was a gifted soccer player at the high school, said Wyoming head coach Steve Thomas.

Darusman, a co-author of the 2014 report, was speaking at the end of a trip to Tokyo, having been repeatedly refused access to North Korea.

Johnson said his company was in contact with Warmbier’s family, US officials and the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang, which represents USA interests in North Korea.

“I think everybody was honest with each other, and I think the North Korean ambassador and I had very good conversations and I had a pretty good relationship with him”, he said.

Warmbier’s arrest comes amid increased tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over North Korea’s recent nuclear test.

Warmbier is a third-year student studying commerce at the University of Virginia, according to The Cavalier Daily, the school’s student newspaper. He says family members and others should be careful not to say anything that might jeopardize negotiations.

The Korean Peninsula has been in a technical state of war since the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice rather than a peace treaty.

North Korea’s detention of Warmbier “really doesn’t give them much leverage at all, it just gets our attention and it creates another hard situation for the family of this young man and our government”. He was charged with “perpetrating a hostile act”, the official Korean Central News Agency said in a one sentence statement describing the offending incident, a lack of transparency that is a historical benchmark of sorts”.

Ji Min-kang, a North Korean who successfully fled the country, told the Guardian in October that, “You can not see the real North Korea as a tourist”. However, the brief report provided no details of Warmbier’s actions, as gathered by the news source. Instead, he urged the South Korean government to consider developing its own nuclear capability “to topple North Korea’s nuclear superiority over the South”.

“The Department of Sate strongly recommends against all travel by USA citizens to North Korea”, the Department notes on its website.

As Guttridge waited for Warmbier to come out of the room, she instructed the rest of her tour group to board the North Korean Air Koryo flight bound for Beijing. This month, a Korean-American told CNN in Pyongyang he was being held by the state for spying.