North Korea was quick to strike back at assertions it tortured imprisoned U. S. student Otto Warmbier during his imprisonment on the peninsula.
North Korea was quick to strike back at assertions that it tortured imprisoned U. S. student Otto Warmbier, reports the Associated Press .
“The fact that the U. S. is employing even a dead person for the conspiracy campaign to fuel the international atmosphere of putting pressure on (North Korea) shows how vile and inveterate the hostility of the U. S. policy-makers towards (North Korea) is,” a state-run newspaper quoted an unidentified North Korean official.
A statement released by the nation’s foreign ministry reads, in part, “Trump and his clique, for their anti-DPRK propaganda, are again exploiting the death of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who had been under reform through labour for the criminal act he committed against the (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) DPRK and died after returning to the US.”
Those statements follow comments made by both Otto Warmbier’s parents and President Trump.
RELATED: Otto Warmbier: A timeline of the student’s North Korea imprisonment
In a Tuesday morning interview with ‘Fox & Friends,’ the Warmbiers said their son was returned with horrifying bodily damage, including bottom teeth that looked like they’d been rearranged by “a pair of pliers.”
“They kidnapped Otto, they tortured him, [and] they intentionally injured him. They are not victims; they are terrorists,” Fred Warmbier, Otto’s father, asserted.
Soon after, Trump tweeted, “Great interview on @foxandfriends with the parents of Otto Warmbier: 1994 – 2017. Otto was tortured beyond belief by North Korea.”
However, coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco “who examined Warmbier’s body after his death in June, said there was no clear evidence of physical torture – including no recently broken bones or damaged teeth,” reports the Guardian.
Sammarco did state that Otto’s condition stemmed from, “an unknown insult (injury) more than a year prior to death.”
NPR reports, North Korea sentenced him to 15 years of imprisonment and hard labor in March of 2016 after he was “accused of trying to steal a propaganda poster.”
