Otto Warmbier’s last vacation: what happened to the young man returned in a coma by North Korea?

Otto Warmbier was 22 years old and not only popular with his friends but also a young scholar who was part of the Student Mutual Fund Committee and traveled to London to take a course in Advanced Econometrics at the London School of Economics.

His dedication took him to Asia to study at a university in Hong Kong, under an overseas program, in January 2016. During that trip, he decided to make a stopover in North Korea.

The trip was made possible by a Chinese travel company called Young Pioneers Tours, which advertised travel services “low-budget trips to places your mother would rather you not go”. That decision would change the course of his life forever, since he returned to the United States on the verge of death.

It was the new year in Korea, Otto was with his fellow travelers watching the fireworks in the main square of Pyongyang. Then they ate dinner and had beers.

Later, they returned to the hotel, the Yanggarkdo International, at that time, according to the North Korean regime, he would have sneaked into an area reserved for employees and would try to take a political propaganda poster.

On January 2, 2016, Otto was detained while passing immigration control at Pyongyang International Airport, after a 3-day stay. He didn’t protest, didn’t seem scared. Danny Gratton, with whom he shared a room, said that he had a half smile when he said goodbye, he joked: “Well, it looks like this will be the last time we’ll see you.”.

He was not seen until some time later, when images of him appeared in front of television cameras to confess why he had been arrested at the end of his tour. Those images shocked the world.

His head was downcast, and before he spoke he bowed to the portraits of North Korea’s former supreme leaders, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Otto, in front of cameras, thanked the Asian country for “the opportunity to apologize for my crime, ask for forgiveness and beg for any assistance to save my life”.

He confessed that he had tried to steal a propaganda poster as a trophy for a Protestant church in Ohio in the USA with the “collusion of the american government and of the INC”, in order to “harm the work ethic and motivation of the Korean people”.

In the event that he is arrested, the church would compensate his family with 200,000 dollars “who were suffering serious economic difficulties,” he said. Afterwards, she burst into tears. “I have taken the worst decision of my life, but I’m just a human being”, he mentioned.

His relatives assured that he had a fake attitude, that he was following orders. Several foreigners detained in Korea have said they were forced to make false confessions.

Then, in a trial that lasted just an hour, he was found guilty of “crimes against the state” and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, the North Korean Supreme Court announced.

On June 13, he returned to the United States for “humanitarian reasons” after 17 months in prison. He was in a vegetative state, six days later he died in a Cincinnati, Ohio hospital.

The authorities maintained that the young man fell into a coma due to the effects of a sleeping pill after contracting botulism; however, US doctors found no signs of the disease, nor traces of physical violence. It could only be confirmed that the neurological damage seemed to be caused by a lack of blood risk from cardiac arrest.

He was detained for 17 months, where nobody knows what happened to him. “Unfortunately, the terrible mistreatment and torture our son received at the hands of the North Koreans made it impossible to go beyond the sad fact that we are experiencing today,” the family said.

Through a statement, relatives reported the death of their son. “It is our sad duty to report that our son, Otto Warmbier, has completed his journey home, surrounded by his loving family. Otto died today at 2.20pm.” Along these lines, they ensured that the young man was “unable to speak, to see and to react to verbal commands”.

“He seemed very uncomfortable, almost distraught. Although we never heard his voice again, in one day he changed the expression on his face, he was at peace, he was at home and we believe he could feel it, “they concluded.

“All this is terrible. Otto was a very good boy, I know that today everyone says so, but he was special and very intelligent, he went to a class ahead of the rest… I remember one day he came to class very well dressed, I asked him and he told me that he wanted impressing the girl across the street, it was sweet,” recalled his calculus teacher, Jane Rotsching.

The then President of the United States, Donald Trump, offered his condolences to Otto’s family and condemned “the brutality of the North Korean regime”.

“Otto’s fate deepens my administration’s determination to prevent such tragedies at the hands of regimes that do not respect the rule of law,” he said.

Source-larepublica.pe