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NORTH KOREA HAS detained a US citizen, officials said, bringing to three the number of Americans now being held there.
Tony Kim, who also goes by his Korean name Kim Sang-duk, was detained on Saturday, according to Park Chan-mo, the chancellor of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.
Park said Kim, who is 58, taught accounting at the university for about a month. He said Kim was detained by officials as he was trying to leave the country from Pyongyang’s international airport. A university spokesman said he was trying to leave with his wife on a flight to China.
The Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang said it was aware of a Korean-American citizen being detained recently, but could not comment further. The embassy looks after consular affairs for the United States in North Korea because the two countries do not have diplomatic relations.
The State Department also said it was aware of the report about a US citizen being detained, but declined further comment “due to privacy considerations”.
Detained
Park said he was informed that the detention had “nothing to do” with Kim’s work at the university but did not know further details.
Kim previously taught Korean at the Yanbian University of Science and Technology in Yanji, China, not far from the North Korea border, said the school’s Communist Party Committee secretary, who would only give his surname, Huang.
Kim resigned last August and has not contacted the school since, Huang said. “We don’t know anything about his trip to North Korea.”
As of Monday morning, North Korea’s official media had not reported on the detention.
The Pyongyang University of Science and Technology is the only privately funded university in North Korea. It held its first classes in 2010. It is unique in the North for its large number of foreign staff.
Colin McCulloch, the director of external affairs, said the university was not under investigation and was continuing its normal operations. He said he could not immediately confirm Kim’s hometown.
Though no details on why Kim was detained have been released, the detention comes at a time of unusually heightened tensions between the US and North Korea. Both countries have recently been trading threats of war and having another American in jail will likely up the ante even further.
Last year, Otto Warmbier, then a 21-year-old University of Virginia student from suburban Cincinnati, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in prison after he confessed to trying to steal a propaganda banner.
Kim Dong Chul, who was born in South Korea but is also believed to have US citizenship, is serving a sentence of 10 years for espionage.
Another foreigner, a Canadian pastor, is also being detained in North Korea. Hyeon Soo Lim, a South Korean-born Canadian citizen in his 60s, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2015 on charges of trying to use religion to destroy the North Korean system and helping US and South Korean authorities lure and abduct North Korean citizens.
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Thanks,but no tanks. it’s time to find a political solution.
@Pat Man: I mean, Russian forces don’t seem to be getting the message that they need to go back where they came from to end this. A few shells in their direction may be a further deterrant.
@Paul Cunningham: and a welcome boost for the European defence industry
@Pat Man: What political solution? Russia is attempting to annex huge parts of Ukraine and Ukraine needs the means to stop them from doing so. Russia will not stop. They aren’t interesting in peace.
It’s amazing how absolutely naive people like you are.
@Seán Ó Briain: agreed. Russia will not stop and will not stop at Ukraine.
@Paddy Ryan: but Lavrov claimed that the west is intent on liquidating Russia in a contemporary version of the Holocaust.
Just when you think they can’t get any sicker. I’m reluctant to use the word, but these people are insane. I can’t think of any other way of describing it. Of course, it’s straight out of the Trump playbook: the more outrageous the claim the better.
It’s time to deliver for Ukraine and put an end to Putin’s War of aggression
The cold hard truth is that Ukraine and Russia’s best and brightest young men are dying, thousands of them. Imagine being a mother or a father to a soldier that you haven’t heard from in months. The govt won’t tell you anything. Most likely he is dead.
The leader of Ukraine wants more weapons… for more sons to die. For what? Its time for peace…
@Diarmuid O’Braonáin: One side of the ‘peace argument’ is Ukrainian loss of independence, the extent of which is far from clear, and from that perspective I understand the arms supplies, but things are getting more and more complicated.
The conflict is currently bogged down while Russia seems to be slowly learning from its past mistakes. Ukraine beating Russia has long been the wishful thinking mode, while the realism that conflicts which don’t end in complete victory or defeat tend to end at the negotiating table is still controversial: Russia’s law-of-the-jungle approach is understandably considered not to be allowed to pay off, but there’s a big dilemma looming:
If Ukraine starts doing worse on the battlefield, which it seems to be, the likelihood increases that NATO member states get more and more invlolved, to the point of a direct confrontation with Russia. And the heavy weaponry which would then be required is already limiting the possibilities to now send these to Ukraine (this is what I think is holding back the Germans).
So western leaders are going to be forced one way or another to start thinking seriously how this war can be brought to a conclusion rather than to be allowed to dangerously drag on and on.
@Diarmuid O’Braonáin: Russia is employing criminals. In an army run by criminals. I don’t see how you can say that the brightest and best are dying. They are safe in st Petersburg and Moscow. You can listen to and watch some of them online. Or you could if they didn’t walk away from the interviewers, afraid to answer questions. All it requires for peace is for Russia to withdraw. Or for Russian troops to stop fighting. But then they will probably end up getting shot or beaten to death with sledgehammers by others of russia’s best and brightest. It is easy for us to sit back and watch Ukrainian soldiers fight on. And no doubt there are huge profits being made by the arms industry and so on. But until the Ukrainian army and people decide to stop fighting, who are we to tell them not to?
@Diarmuid O’Braonáin: As I’Ve read elsewhere ‘If Russia stops fighting, there will be no war, if Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine’
Give tanks for the eventual elimination of Putin and his evil deeds..Amen.
Zelensky for man of the year
@Aidy McBride: LOL
We should keep the US out of this and Europe on its own should turn back putin easily. Then the Russian people will turn on their weak leader. Finally Russia can join European prosperity instead of a totalitarian schite show.
A special international dispensation for the execution of Russian war criminals on a pay per view event with the funds raised going to the rebuilding of Ukraine. All children over the age of 12 to watch with a sincere explanation of what these hateful humans have done prior to the drop. Sounds Orwellian? I don’t care. I sincerely want to see putin and lavrov with their tongues lolling. History doesn’t work anymore obviously, time for something slightly more medieval.
@Paul: What about US war criminals? Israeli war criminals?
Go get em!
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