North Korea announced yesterday it has sentenced a US man to eight years of hard labor for an illegal border crossing and an unspecified hostile act.
Aijalon Mahli Gomes “admitted all the facts” when he appeared at the central court in Pyongyang on Tuesday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
Representatives from the Swedish embassy, which represents US interests in North Korea, were allowed “as an exception” to attend the trial, it said.
Gomes, 30, from Boston, was formerly an English teacher in South Korea and described by colleagues as a devout Christian. He crossed the border from China on January 25, according to reports from Pyongyang.
The North also announced that Gomes was fined 70 million won, (US$700,000) at the North Korean trade bank’s official exchange rate.
He is the fourth US citizen accused of entering the hardline communist state illegally in little more than a year. Three previous offenders were pardoned and deported. Analysts said Gomes may also be freed as Pyongyang seeks to improve relations with Washington.
“The North is not going to hold him for eight years,” professor Kim Yong-hyun of Seoul’s Dongguk University said. “It is likely to suspend the implementation of the sentence and expel him as a goodwill gesture toward the US.”
A Seoul activist, Jo Sung-rae, said last month that Gomes had taken part in anti-Pyongyang rallies in South Korea and was moved to tears by accounts of rights abuses in the North.
Gomes crossed into the North one month after US missionary Robert Park walked into the country across a frozen border river from China on Christmas Day, calling on leader Kim Jong-il to quit because of rights abuses.
Jo said Gomes may have been inspired by Park’s example.
North Korea freed Park in February without putting him on trial. Its official news agency quoted him as saying he had been misled by false Western propaganda.
In March last year the North detained two female US television journalists for illegal entry and “hostile acts.”
It sentenced them to 12 years of hard labor but pardoned them when former US president Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang in August and met Kim.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
‘LIMITING MYSELF’: New Zealand’s foreign minister said that the omments by Phil Goff were ‘disappointing’ and made the diplomat’s position in the UK ‘untenable’ New Zealand’s most senior envoy to the UK has lost his job over remarks he made about US President Donald Trump at an event in London this week, New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said yesterday. Phil Goff, who is New Zealand’s High Commissioner to the UK, made the comments at an event held by international affairs think tank Chatham House in London on Tuesday. Goff asked a question from the audience of the guest speaker, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Elina Valtonen, in which he said he had been re-reading a famous speech by former British prime minister Winston
RSS