These Three Americans Are Still Imprisoned In North Korea

Otto Warmbier, the American college student detained in North Korea for more than 17 months, was returned Tuesday to his hometown of Cincinnati. His release brings the number of U.S. citizens known to be in detention in the hermetic communist dictatorship down to three.

Warmbier was arrested in Pyongyang in January 2016, while visiting the country on a group tour. The then-21-year-old student was accused of trying to steal propaganda signage from a restricted area in his hotel and convicted of committing "hostile acts" toward the regime of Kim Jong Un. He was sentenced to 15 years hard labor, and he had not been seen or heard from since he appeared in a dramatic confession apologizing for "the biggest mistake" of his life. In a statement confirming Warmbier's homecoming, his parents said they were told their son had been comatose since March 2016, the month he was convicted. A North Korean official told a U.S. counterpart that Warmbier had contracted botulism and fell into the coma after taking a sleeping pill, CNN reports. Warmbier's parents said they learned of their son's condition "only one week ago."

The uncertainty over Warmbier's condition and treatment in detention speaks to the opacity of North Korea's justice system. But accounts of former prisoners have shed some light on the harsh conditions he and other detainees might have endured. In his memoir Not Forgotten, missionary Kenneth Bae, who was imprisoned for more than two years, wrote of daily interrogations “from 8 in the morning until 10 or 11 o’clock at night, every day for four weeks.” Another detainee, journalist Laura Ling, has spoken of being imprisoned in a 5-by-6-foot cell, the New York Times reports. Three other U.S. citizens are believed to still be in North Korean custody. All are Korean-American, and two were in the strictly secular country working with a Christian-backed university based in China, near the Korean border. The third was a businessman.

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