In this Feb. 29, 2016, file photo, American student Otto Warmbier speaks as he is presented to reporters in Pyongyang, North Korea. North Korea’s highest court on March 16, 2016 sentenced Warmbier, who allegedly attempted to steal a propaganda banner from a restricted area of his hotel, to 15 years of hard labor in prison. (AP Photo/Kim Kwang Hyon, File)
The parents of Otto Warmbier, the American student jailed by North Korea before being sent home in a coma where he died days later, sued the Pyongyang regime on Thursday for the alleged torture and murder of their son.
Cindy and Fred Warmbier said in the civil suit filed at Washington District Court that their son was imprisoned by North Korea after being forced to confess to stealing a poster while he was on a tourist visit in early February 2016.
“North Korea, which is a rogue regime, took Otto hostage for its own wrongful ends, and brutally tortured and murdered him,” they said in the suit.
Their action comes at a sensitive time as United States officials prepare for a summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Trump has demanded that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.
After having repeatedly castigated Pyongyang last year over Warmbier’s death, Trump praised Kim as “very honorable” and “very open” earlier this week.
Earlier this year, however, Warmbier’s parents attended Trump’s first State of the Union address where he heralded them as “powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world.”
The lawsuit said Warmbier, a University of Virginia student, was on an innocent five-day trip to North Korea in December 2015, at the time that the US announced new sanctions against Kim’s regime over its nuclear weapons proliferation activities.
Warmbier was detained on January 2, 2016 as his tour group was departing, accused of hostile acts against the country as an agent of the US government – specifically, stealing a political poster from his hotel as a “trophy”.
Forced to make what his parents said was a “false confession,” he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
After lengthy negotiations, he was returned to the US on June 13, 2017, comatose. The North Koreans blamed his condition on medicine they said he took for botulism.
Told by doctors he would never recover, the parents agreed to remove him from life support and he died six days later at age 22.
The suit tied his detention and mistreatment to the escalating tensions between the two countries over North Korea’s test of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles at the time.
“In an attempt to extract various concessions from the United States government, North Korea detained Otto, forced him to falsely ‘confess’ to an act of subversion on behalf of the United States government, tortured him, kept him in detention for a year and a half without allowing him to communicate with his family, and returned him to them in a non-responsive state and brain dead,” the suit noted.
The suit asked for unstated damages as well as punitive fines. /kga