North Korea Confirms Detention of Tony Kim, an American Teacher
By CHOE SANG-HUNMAY 3, 2017
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea confirmed on Wednesday
that it was holding an American citizen, saying the man was being held for committing "hostile criminal acts with an aim to subvert the country." The dispatch by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, or KCNA, was its first official confirmation of the arrest in late April of Kim Sang-duk, who also goes by his American name, Tony Kim.
Mr. Kim had taught accounting at Yanbian University of Science
and Technology in China before traveling to Pyongyang, where he taught for about a month at a sister school, the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, according to Park Chan-mo, the university’s chancellor.
Last year, North Korea sentenced an American college student, Otto F. Warmbier, to 15 years’ hard
labor after accusing him of trying to steal a political banner from a hotel in Pyongyang.
The South Korean news agency Yonhap said Mr. Kim was also engaged in humanitarian work in the North, helping orphanages in the country’s northeast.
As the North has conducted banned tests of ballistic missiles in recent weeks, the United States dispatched
an aircraft carrier strike group to waters off the Korean Peninsula as a show of force.
Mr. Kim’s detention comes at a particularly tense moment in relations between the United States and North Korea.
