An American student who took a political propaganda poster from a hotel in the North Korean capital Pyongyang has been sentenced to 15 years hard labour for crimes against the state.
Otto Warmbier (21) an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia, was convicted after a one-hour trial on Wednesday morning at North Korea's supreme court, China's Xinhua news agency reported.
Last month he tearfully apologised at a news conference in Pyongyang for stealing the poster, saying he wanted it as a trophy for a friend’s mother and confessing that his crime was “very severe and pre-planned”.
He was at the end of a five-day New Year's group tour of North Korea.
Westerners are regularly arrested in North Korea, many of them Christian evangelists trying to proselytise. They are often convicted of subversion crimes including illegal entry and leaving a Bible behind in a hotel.
A 60-year-old South Korean-born Canadian pastor was arrested in North Korea last year and given a life sentence for subversion, while earlier this month, a Korean-American called Kim Dong-chul was jailed for spying for South Korea.
In 2009, two American journalists were arrested in North Korea and freed after Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang, and in 2014, Pyongyang released three detained Americans.
North Korea has used jailed Americans in the past to extract high-profile visits from the United States, with which it has no formal diplomatic relations.
Earlier this week, US diplomat Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, met with two North Korean officials in New York to urge Mr Warmbier’s release on humanitarian grounds.
