North Korea releases footage of crime that got American student jailed for 15 years
North Korea has released security camera footage of American undergrad Otto Warmbier committing the crime that got him 15 years of imprisonment and hard labour in the hermit state.
The grainy video, released late on Thursday, purportedly shows Warmbier removing a propaganda banner from a staff-only section of the Yanggakdo International Hotel in Pyongyang, where he was staying over the New Year.
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According to reports, the banner in the hotel says "Let's arm ourselves strongly with Kim Jong-il patriotism", a phrase that was used to rally North Koreans after the death of the late leader.
North Korea claims the footage is from New Year's Day this year. A fellow traveller on Warmbier's flight had told the Independent that the members of Warmbier's tour group were up till the wee hours of the morning drinking vodka on the day, before a morning flight.
The 21-year-old University of Virginia student was stopped at the airport and taken away by guards.
In February, North Korea presented him to the press, where he cried bitterly and apologised for stealing the banner, which he said he intended to present as a "trophy" to a friend back home.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court convicted Warmbier for "crimes against the state", and sentenced him to 15 years of hard labour -- a punishment the country has become notorious for.
Warmbier is not the first American to be detained in North Korea, but his sentence is one of the harshest.
In the past, North Korea has held out until senior U.S. officials or statesmen came to personally bail out detainees, all the way up to 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 U.S. spy chief James Clapper to bring home Matthew Miller, who had ripped up his visa when entering the country, and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been incarcerated since November 2012.
Jeffrey Fowle, another U.S. tourist from Ohio detained for six months at about the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a U.S. government plane.
He left a Bible in a local club hoping a North Korean would find it, which is considered a criminal offence in North Korea.
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Additional reporting by The Associated Press.
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Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
