US citizen jailed for 10 years for spying in North Korea

Kim Dong Chul second American to be put behind bars on espionage charges this year

This file picture released from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on March 25th, 2016 shows Kim Dong-Chul addressing a news conference in Pyongyang. Photograph: KCNA/AFP/Getty Images
This file picture released from North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on March 25th, 2016 shows Kim Dong-Chul addressing a news conference in Pyongyang. Photograph: KCNA/AFP/Getty Images

A US citizen of Korean heritage has been jailed for 10 years in North Korea after being convicted of espionage and subversion.

Kim Dong Chul had been detained in the North on suspicion of engaging in spying and stealing state secrets. He is the second American to be put behind bars this year.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labour after a brief trial in Pyongyang. North Korea’s Supreme Court found Kim guilty of crimes and espionage and subversion of under Articles 60 and 64 of the North’s criminal code.

Further details were not immediately available.

READ MORE

When he was paraded before the media in Pyongyang last month, Kim said he had collaborated with and spied for South Korean intelligence authorities in a plot to bring down the North’s leadership and had tried to spread religion among North Koreans before his arrest in the city of Rason last October.

South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the country’s main spy agency, has said Kim’s case was not related to the organisation in any way.

Coerced

Kim’s jail term follows a 15-year sentence handed down to Otto Warmbier, an American university student who the North says was engaged in anti-state activities while visiting the country as a tourist earlier this year.

North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the US-backed South Korean government to control the entire Korean Peninsula. Some foreigners previously arrested have read statements of guilt they later said were coerced.

Most of those who are sentenced to long prison terms are released before serving their full time.

In the past, North Korea has held out until senior US officials or statesmen came to personally bail out detainees, including former president Bill Clinton, whose visit in 2009 secured the freedom of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Both had crossed North Korea’s border from China illegally.

It took a visit in November 2014 by US spy chief James Clapper to bring home Mathew Miller, also arrested after entering the country as a tourist, and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been incarcerated since November 2012.

Jeffrey Fowle, a US tourist detained for six months at about the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a US government plane. Fowle left a Bible in a local club hoping a North Korean would find it, which is considered a criminal offence in North Korea.

PA