WASHINGTON // An American student who fell into a coma while imprisoned in a North Korean labour camp has returned to the United States after Pyongyang allowed him to be flown home.
A military aircraft carrying Otto Warmbier, 22, landed in his hometown of Cincinnati shortly before 10:20pm.
Secretary of state Rex Tillerson said had “secured” Warmbier’s release, 18 months into his 15-year-sentence, in talks with North Korea and is pushing for three more Americans to be freed. It is not know if Mr Tillerson made any concessions.
The news of Warmbier’s release emerged after the flamboyant retired NBA basketball star Dennis Rodman — a former contestant on Mr Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” reality show — flew to Pyongyang to resume his quixotic quest to broker detente between his US homeland and Kim Jong-Un’s authoritarian regime.
But state department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the visit “had nothing to do with the release”.
Warmbier’s parents, Fred and Cindy, said they had learnt only a week ago that their son was in a coma and had been in that condition since March 2016.
“We want the world to know how we and our son have been brutalised and terrorised by the pariah regime,” they said.
On arriving in Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport, Warmbier was transferred to a waiting ambulance that took him to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center for urgent treatment.
Warmbier’s parents were told their son had contracted botulism and never woke up after he was given a sleeping pill soon after his trial in March last year. A senior US official also told The New York Times that Warmbier was repeatedly beaten while in custody.
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Warmbier, a student at the University of Virginia, was arrested for removing a political banner from a wall at a North Korean hotel. He was detained at the airport as he was leaving the country with a tour group in January 2016.
At a news conference before his trial, a sobbing Warmbier said he had made “the worst mistake of my life” and pleaded to be released.
The United States accused North Korea of using Warmbier as a political pawn, condemning the sentence as far out of proportion to his alleged crime.
* Agence France-Presse
