Death of Otto Warmbier raises fears for other North Korea detainees

Donald Trump has criticised North Korea's "brutal regime" following the death of US student Otto Warmbier, who Pyongyang sent home in a coma last week after 17 months in jail.

"Otto's fate deepens my administration's determination to prevent such tragedies from befalling innocent people at the hands of regimes that do not respect the rule of law or basic human decency," the US president said..

Warmbier, a University of Virginia student with what the New York Times called an "adventuresome spirit", was sentenced to 15 years' hard labour after attempting to steal a propaganda poster from a Pyongyang hotel while on holiday. But he is said to have fallen ill in jail and was returned to the US on 13 June in a coma.

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Concern for US prisoners

North Korean officials claimed Warmbier contracted botulism shortly after his trial and had been unresponsive ever since. His parents, Fred and Cindy, were informed he was in a coma earlier this month, after more than a year with no word of their son.

The couple confirmed yesterday that Warmbier had died while being treated at a hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, and claimed he had been the victim of "awful, torturous mistreatment" in North Korea.

An initial inspection of the student's body has found no marks of physical injury, nor have US doctors found any evidence that he had contracted botulism.

However, the New York Times reports that a senior US intelligence official said they have reason to believe Warmbier was beaten in custody.

Susan Thornton, US acting assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said the State Department was now concerned for the welfare of three other US citizens held in North Korea.

Kim Dong-chul, 62, was convicted of espionage in April 2016 and sentenced to ten years' hard labour, while Kim Sang-duk and Kim Hak-song are awaiting trial.

"We very much hope that they can come home soon," said Thornton.

Life in a re-education camp

The brutality of North Korea's penal system, where even seemingly minor offences can result in a lengthy spell in one of the many labour and "re-education" camps, is no secret.

Accounts from former detainees paint an almost incomprehensibly grim picture of life inside the prisons, which have been compared to Nazi concentration camps.

The 2012 book Escape from Camp 14 detail's Shin Dong-hyuk's life inside one such camp.

Shin, who was in the camp in 1982, says he was forced to work from the age of ten and claimed to have seen children being beaten to death by guards, mutilation of prisoners and public executions.

Although he later recanted parts of his story, other defectors have testified to the extreme violence inside the camps, including torture, forced abortions and medical experimentation.

Westerners detained in North Korea in recent years have largely been spared the most brutal excesses of the regime's justice system.

Robert R King, the former State Department official in charge of Warmbier's case, told the New York Times that Pyongyang had previously demonstrated "a general attitude of not using physical violence against Americans".

He added: "They don't want anyone to die on their watch - this is why the Otto Warmbier case is unusual."

Warmbier's case appears to have been handled differently from those of other US detainees. For one thing, his sentence - 15 years' hard labour - was far longer than those handed out to others for what would seem to be far more significant crimes.

In 2013, 85-year-old US army veteran Merrill Newman, part of a tour group visiting Pyongyang, was arrested in connection with his service in a partisan unit during the Korean War. He was allowed to return to the US after 42 days in detention.

The following year, Jeffrey Fowle, 56, admitted hiding a Korean bible in a social club in the northern port city of Chongjin, in defiance of a strict ban. He was released and sent home without charge after six months in custody.

In another marked contrast with Warmbier's case, past US detainees have almost uniformly returned home in relatively good health.

"Western prisoners are coveted as political bargaining chips in the North Korean system," says USA Today, and reports of physical mistreatment are rare.

Matthew Todd Miller of California spent six months in jail after tearing up his tourist visa on a trip to North Korea in 2014, allegedly as part of a plan to see inside the regime. Upon his release, he told several news outlets he had been surprised by the comfortable conditions of his confinement.

"I was prepared for the torture but instead of that, I was killed with kindness," he told NK News.

However, his fellow detainee Korean-American tour guide Kenneth Bae, who spent nearly two years in a North Korean prison camp for "hostile acts", was more ambiguous about his experience.

Although he corroborated Miller's claims that they were not tortured or beaten, Bae described gruelling marathon interrogation sessions and intense physical labour despite suffering a myriad of health issues.

"I worked from 8am to 6pm at night, working on the field, carrying rock, shovelling coal," he told CNN.

According to King, North Korea probably "did not intend" to cause Warmbier's death. However, the incident "is likely to worsen the already tense relations between the United States and North Korea," says the New York Times.

Republican senator John McCain said: "Let us state the facts plainly: Otto Warmbier, an American citizen, was murdered by the Kim Jong-un regime."

North Korea is expected to top the agenda when US and Chinese officials sit down in Washington, DC for a series of high-level diplomatic talks.

However, with Pyongyang already under the heaviest possible sanctions, "it's unclear what more the US could do to gain some sense of justice for the Warmbier family," Time magazine reported.

"What can the US and its allies do after Otto's death?" an analyst who asked to remain anonymous told the magazine. "The brutal reality is nothing.”