North Korea says it released Otto Warmbier on humanitarian grounds

NORTH Korea has released US student Otto Warmbier  on humanitarian grounds after the 22-year-old student fell into a coma in a labour camp.

The University of Virginia student was flown from Pyongyang on a private jet after spending 17 months in custody having been jailed for stealing a propaganda poster from a hotel during a trip to the hermit state.

His family said their son had been ‘terrorized and brutalized’ while in custody.

North Korea’s propaganda channel KCNA said: ‘Otto Frederick Warmbier, who had been in hard labour, was sent back home on June 13, 2017 on humanitarian grounds according to the adjudication made on the same day by the Central Court of the DPRK.’

Warmbier’s release came after a flurry of secret diplomatic contacts between Washington and Pyongyang, which culminated in Joseph Yun, the State Department’s special envoy on North Korea, travelling to Pyongyang to secure Warmbier’s release.

‘Joseph Yun went to Pyongyang to accompany Mr Warmbier home,’ Thomas Shannon, undersecretary of state for political affairs, told reporters in Seoul Wednesday.

Warmbier’s parents Fred and Cindy have said that they were told their son had been in a coma since March 2016, allegedly after falling ill from botulism and being given a sleeping pill.

‘Otto is not in great shape right now,’ Fred Warmbier told Fox News Wednesday after his son arrived back in the US on a military airplane and was taken straight to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center for urgent treatment.