Tour agency: American detained over Pyongyang hotel incident

Johnson said China-based Young Pioneer Tours was in contact with Warmbier’s family and U.S. officials. “It was during this time that it was discovered that there had been an incident”, the statement said.

In a letter sent Friday to Obama, Kasich wrote North Korea “should be called upon either to provide immediate evidence of Mr. Warmbier’s alleged anti-state activities or to discharge Mr. Warmbier from custody immediately”. In Dec. 2014, a trilateral information sharing pact was signed by South Korea, the United States, and Japan for the sharing of all forms of intelligence on the North Korean nuclear and missile threat in “oral, visual, electronic, magnetic or documentary form”.

A University of Virginia student is at the center of an global dispute. A Theta Chi fraternity brother, Miles Kirwin, added, “He’s an incredible guy”. Warmbier was detained as he was leaving the country.

North Korea, which is trying to promote tourism partly as a way to earn foreign currency, dramatically eased restrictions on American tourists in 2008, allowing for more Americans to visit at more times of the year.

Less than a week after carrying out the latest test, authorities in Pyongyang gave CNN access to Kim Dong-chul, who described himself as a naturalized US citizen detained on suspicion of spying for South Korea. Western tourism in the country has grown over the past several years, despite the detention of nine Americans in the last decade.

Warmbier reportedly entered the country using a tourist visa.

It was identical to an earlier dispatch from the North’s official Korean Central News Agency announcing the arrest.

Also that year, North Korea held Jeffrey Fowle, a 56-year-old public worker from OH, for five months after he left a Bible in a restroom at a seamen’s club in the northeastern city of Chongjin. He was returned to the United States in 2014 after efforts by the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang.

Still, you don’t wish for any American to have to go through what will happen to this young man in the brutal conditions of a North Korean prison.

If Warmbier’s experience is like that of previous detainees, he will likely be held awaiting trial. “But it is quite risky to visit (North Korea) as a tourist given the sensitivities regarding anything about the state, the leadership, government, and political system, or geo-politics in general”.

Jimmy Carter traveled to North Korea to win the release of Aijalon Mahli Gomes, an American accused of illegally entering the country in 2010, and Bill Clinton went to North Korea to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee in 2009.

The US government chooses such emissaries carefully.

The United States and North Korea are in a technical state of war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty. He took a quick five-day trip to North Korea for New Year’s and is now stuck there indefinitely. “If you’re caught with one of those pictures, it’s literally a foreign agent committing espionage against the DPRK”, he says.

A man who was held by North Korea for almost six months in 2014 says he’s “surprised and disheartened” to learn a fellow southwest OH resident has been detained there.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich, campaigning in New Hampshire as a Republican presidential candidate, called the arrest “inexcusable”.