Tour agency: American detained over Pyongyang hotel incident

Small American flags have been placed in the trees in front of the Warmbier family home on Friday, Jan. 22, in Wyoming, Ohio.

North Korea said Friday that it had arrested an American university student for alleged anti-state acts.

Gareth Johnson of Young Pioneers told Reuters that Warmbier was detained in Pyongyang on January 2.

Warmbier is a third-year student studying commerce at the University of Virginia, according to The Cavalier Daily, the school’s student newspaper. Tensions between the US and North Korea increased earlier this month after the rogue nation claimed it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb.

In a statement published in the state-run Korean Central News Agency, North Korean officials hinted that Warmbier was acting with the support or on behalf of the USA government.

“One of the problems is we don’t have a lot of leverage with North Korea because we don’t have a relationship with them to speak of that’s good”, he said.

South Korean television network KBS reported the skit showed North Korean children singing a song with lyrics telling US soldiers in Korea to “leave, and leave immediately”.

In the past, North Korea has exploited American prisoners to try to wring concessions from the United States or to compel senior officials to visit the country and meet with its leaders. “We believe coordination with the other parties would be a useful step in our ongoing efforts to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula through credible and authentic negotiations”, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Seoul said in a short statement.

While the vast majority of tourists to North Korea are from China, roughly 6,000 westerners visit the country annually.

North Korea desires recognition, so the United States deliberately avoids sending actual diplomats or policymakers. The U.S. Department of State has warned against travel to the North, however, and visitors, especially those from America, who break the country’s sometimes murky rules risk detention, arrest and possible jail sentences.

Also that year, North Korea held Jeffrey Fowle, a 56-year-old public worker from OH, for five months after he left a Bible in a restroom at a seamen’s club in the northeastern city of Chongjin.

KCNA identified the person as Warmbier Otto Frederick, a student at Virginia University.

The most recent in a series of arresting American tourists and missionaries fueled speculations that North Korea is trying to win influence over U.S.

“Many tourists – and all of the foreign tour operators – assuage their consciences by telling themselves they are furthering the cause of peace or reform by building trust, breaking down barriers, and so on”, B.R. Myers, a well-known North Korea scholar who teaches at a university in Busan, South Korea, told The Washington Post. Telling her North Korean guides the truth about the the rest of the world, she said, would have put them in huge danger if she were overheard.

“I’m asking the US or South Korean government to rescue me”, Mr Kim told a CNN correspondent through an interpreter at a hotel in Pyongyang.