North Korea has accused the US of waging a “defamation campaign” against Pyongyang for sending the father of former prisoner Otto Warmbier to the Winter Olympics.
Fred Warmbier’s 22-year-old son, Otto, died in June 2017 after suffering a severe neurological injury during his time in the slammer and was left in a coma.
The University of Virginia student from Ohio was arrested for stealing a propaganda poster from a hotel during a 2016 trip to the hermit kingdom. He was paraded in front of a kangaroo court and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor.
He was held for 17 months before being released in a comatose state, but died shortly after arriving in the US.
The hermit kingdom claimed he had fallen into a coma after contracting botulism and being given a sleeping pill — but he reportedly had been subjected to a severe beating.
Vice President Mike Pence, who led the US delegation to the Winter Games in PyeongChang, traveled with Fred Warmbier to the South to “remind the world of the atrocities happening in North Korea.”
“I’m telling the truth about the regime’s treatment of my son. But guess what, they do this to countless other people,” Warmbier told NBC News at the Olympics. “This isn’t defiance. This is telling the truth. This is standing up and being the voice of Otto.”
But the North — which launched a charm offensive by sending 22 athletes and a high-level delegation that included despot Kim Jong Un’s sister Kim Yo Jong — lashed out at Washington.
“The United States is again kicking up a defamation campaign against the DPRK, intentionally attributing Warmbier’s death to the latter,” said state-run news agency KCNA, using the initials of the North’s official name, according to Agence France-Presse.
“It is not accidental that there is an assessment coming from the US that the present administration’s increased move of taking up the DPRK’s ‘human rights’ issue amounts to an attempt for ‘regime change,'” the statement said.
Quoting the press director of the Institute for American Studies at the Foreign Ministry in Pyongyang, it accused the US of capitalizing on Otto’s death to cast the nuclear-armed North in a bad light.
“It is a manifestation of crafty intention aimed at … stirring up an international pressure and vindicating its attempt to stifle us by force, as Trump … is terrified at the strength of the DPRK that has made a dignified rise to the status of strategic state,” it said.
During their trip, Pence and Warmbier met several North Korean refugees who urged efforts to expose human rights abuses by the rogue regime.
The North lashed out at Pence’s meeting with what it described as “human scum who committed crimes of treason against the nation.”
It said the US should “mind its own miserable human rights record,” including “bloody tragic events caused by Trump’s unbridled remarks of advocating for white supremacy and racism.”
Tensions have skyrocketed recently as the North staged its most powerful nuclear test and test-fired several missiles, some capable of reaching the US mainland.