SEOUL: A US citizen jailed this month in North Korea wanted to be imprisoned so he could reveal the human rights situation inside, the North’s state media said yesterday.
Matthew Miller allegedly ripped up his tourist visa and demanded asylum at Pyongyang’s airport in April, and was sentenced to six years’ hard labour by the country’s Supreme Court last Sunday.
The 24-year-old nurtured “a foolish idea of spying on the prison and human rights situation while experiencing ‘prison life’,” the North’s Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said, in a story entitled “Detailed Report on Truth about Crime of American.”
His “inveterate hostility” toward the regime was fostered by anti-Pyongyang broadcasts and publications he absorbed after arriving in South Korea’s capital as a jobless university dropout, it said.
“(He) deliberately perpetrated such criminal acts for the purpose of directly going to prison..., spying on ‘human rights’ performance and making it known to the world.”
In its report issued in February, the UN Commission on Inquiry into the North’s rights record detailed a wide range of systemic abuses including murder, enslavement and torture.
The verdict against Miller came two weeks after he and the two other US detainees, Kenneth Bae and Jeffrey Fowle, pleaded for Washington’s help in a televised interview with CNN in Pyongyang.
A photo of the evidence presented during his trial showed what appeared to be Miller’s ripped-up visa, as well as his US passport, a tablet computer and a smartphone.
Japan clears air on skulls
TOKYO: Japan’s foreign ministry insisted there was no mystery behind human skulls stored at its consulate in Chicago for three months, saying officials were checking if they were the remains of WWII soldiers.
A box containing human bones, including two skulls, arrived at the consulate in the post in mid-June with an unsigned letter saying they were those of Japanese soldiers killed on a small Pacific island during World War II, a ministry official in Tokyo said.
The Chicago Tribune had reported the letter, post-marked June 14 in Minnesota, asked Japanese diplomats to take the bones back to Japan to be properly buried.
The daily said the skulls were delivered to local police only after staff members “found the box” while cleaning out a closet recently. The newspaper said it was not clear why there had been a three month delay in the transfer to law enforcement officers.
But the Japanese official said there was nothing untoward or improper and the box had been properly stored.
“It took us time to check if the bones could actually belong to former Japanese soldiers as the letter said,” the official said.
“We reported the case to Chicago police soon after the box arrived and carried out the examination in cooperation with local police,” he said. Agencies
