US citizen sentenced to 10 years in N. Korea
Print Edition
NORTH Korea yesterday sentenced a United States citizen of Korean heritage to 10 years in prison after convicting him of espionage and subversion, the second American it has put behind bars this year.
Kim Dong Chul was detained in North Korea on suspicion of engaging in spying and stealing state secrets. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labor after a brief trial in Pyongyang.
The country’s Supreme Court found Kim guilty of the crimes of espionage and subversion under its criminal code.
Further details were not immediately available. When he was paraded before the media in Pyongyang last month, Kim said he had collaborated with and spied for South Korean intelligence authorities in a plot to bring down North Korea’s leadership and had tried to spread religion before his arrest in Rason last October.
South Korea’s National Intelligence Service said Kim’s case wasn’t related to the organization in any way.
His sentencing comes on the heels of a 15-year sentence handed down on Otto Warmbier, an American university student who Pyongyang said was engaged in anti-state activities while visiting the country as a tourist earlier this year.
North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the US-backed South Korean government to control the entire Korean Peninsula. Some foreigners previously arrested have read statements of guilt they later said were coerced.
Most of those who are sentenced to long prison terms are released before serving their full time.
In the past, North Korea has held out until senior US 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 US journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Both had crossed North Korea’s border from China illegally.
It took a visit in November 2014 by US spy chief James Clapper to bring home Mathew Miller, also arrested after entering the country as a tourist, and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been incarcerated since November 2012.
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