An American student who fell into a coma while imprisoned in a North Korean labor camp returned to the United States late Tuesday after Pyongyang allowed him to be flown home, US media reported.
A military airplane carrying Otto Warmbier landed in his hometown Cincinnati, Ohio, shortly before 10:20 pm (0220 GMT Wednesday), CBS News reported.
The release of Warmbier, 18 months into a 15-year sentence, came as US President Donald Trump invited South Korea’s new leader Moon Jae-In to Washington for talks on the escalating standoff over the North’s nuclear program.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said earlier in the day that his agency had “secured” the 22-year-old’s release in talks with North Korea and is pushing for three more Americans to be freed. It was not immediately clear if he had made any concessions. The news surfaced after the flamboyant retired NBA basketball star Dennis Rodman — a former contestant on Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice” reality show — flew to Pyongyang to resume his quixotic quest to broker detente between his US homeland and Kim Jong-Un’s authoritarian regime. (AFP)
