The authoritarian regime has released few details about Kim Dong-chul, Kim Hak-song and Tony Kim.
Three Americans remain imprisoned in North Korea after the release of 22-year-old Ohio native Otto Warmbier, who died Monday after returning to the U. S. in a state of “unresponsive wakefulness” last week.
North Korean officials reportedly detained Warmbier in January 2016 at Pyongyang International Airport and sentenced him to 15 years of hard labor for attempting to steal a government banner.
“We hold North Korea accountable for Otto Warmbier’s unjust imprisonment, and demand the release of three other Americans who have been illegally detained, ” U. S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote in a statement.
North Korea has released few, if any, details about the status of the remaining detainees, all of whom are Korean-American.
The first prisoner, Kim Dong-chul, worked as a businessman and was detained in 2015, months before Warmbier’s arrest. The other two prisoners ― Kim Hak-song and Tony Kim ― both worked at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology and were detained in April and May this year.
North Korean officials allegedly arrested Kim Dong-chul, a businessman, in October 2015 while he was reportedly attempting to receive classified information from a former government agent.
CNN first reported Kim’s imprisonment in January 2016 after North Korean officials granted the network an exclusive interview with him at a hotel in Pyongyang.
In the interview, Kim said he was a 62-year-old naturalized U. S. citizen and had previously lived in Fairfax, Virginia.
