WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge ordered North Korea to pay more than $500 million in a wrongful death suit filed by the parents of…
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge ordered North Korea to pay more than $500 million in a wrongful death suit filed by the parents of Otto Warmbier, an American college student who died shortly after being released from that country.
U. S. District Judge Beryl Howell harshly condemned North Korea for «barbaric mistreatment» of Warmbier in agreeing Monday with his family that the isolated nation should be held liable for his death last year. She awarded punitive damages and payments covering medical expenses, economic loss and pain and suffering to Fred and Cindy Warmbier, who alleged that their son had been held hostage and tortured.
Warmbier was a University of Virginia student who was visiting North Korea with a tour group when he was arrested and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in March 2016 on suspicion of stealing a propaganda poster. He died in June 2017, shortly after he returned to the U. S. in a coma and showing apparent signs of torture while in custody.
In holding North Korean responsible, Howell said the government had seized Warmbier for «use as a pawn in that totalitarian state’s global shenanigans and face-off with the United States.»
«Before Otto traveled with a tour group on a five-day trip to North Korea, he was a healthy, athletic student of economics and business in his junior year at the University of Virginia, with ‘big dreams’ and both the smarts and people skills to make him his high school class salutatorian, homecoming king, and prom king,» the judge wrote.
