After Otto Warmbier’s release, efforts are turning to freeing three other detainees
TOKYO — The three American citizens still being held in North Korea are in fairly healthy condition and were allowed to meet with the State Department’s top official on North Korea, Joseph Yun, when he traveled to Pyongyang earlier this week.
Yun went on a secret mission to North Korea to bring out Otto Warmbier, the University of Virginia student who was detained in January last year and had fallen into a coma for reasons that are not yet clear.
Warmbier arrived home in Cincinnati on Tuesday and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. His condition is not known, but his parents plan to speak to the media on Thursday.
The revelation that he had been in a coma in North Korea for more than a year will inject new momentum into efforts to have the other three released, said Evans Revere, a former senior official in the State Department who still talks to North Korean representatives.
“The suspicions and the concerns about the way that Otto was treated is going to lead to a very determined effort by the administration to put pressure on North Korea and get these men out of there, ” Revere said. “The North Koreans will realize there will be very negative consequences.”
While he was collecting Warmbier from Pyongyang, Yun, the special representative for North Korea policy, met with the three American citizens still being held there on Monday, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.
All three men were in a healthy state under the circumstances, one said. There was no information about where they were being held or under what conditions.
The three include Kim Dong-chul, a 63-year-old former Fairfax man who was arrested in October 2015, a few months before Warmbier.
Kim had moved to the northeastern Chinese city of Yanji in 2001 and had been working in the Rajin-Sonbong special economic zone, just over the border in North Korea, as head of a trade and hotel services company.
Kim was accused of espionage and subversion, and was brought before the cameras in March last year to deliver a highly choreographed confession, similar to the one that Warmbier was made to give.
