SEOUL: North Korea has a well-thumbed playbook for detained American citizens who are valuable diplomatic bargaining chips for the regime, but the case of Otto Warmbier, flown home in a coma this week, is a glaring exception. “With Otto Warmbier they wanted to play the same game again,” Andrei Lankov, Korearisk.com director and professor at Kookmin University, told Agence France-Presse. Warmbier, a 22-year-old University of Virginia student from Cincinnati who was in North Korea as a tourist, looked set to follow the usual pattern. Experts said it was unlikely North Korea would have intentionally put a detained American into a coma. “It must have been an accident and that’s probably why they were hiding it for a year,” Go Myong-Hyun, researcher at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, told Agence France-Presse.

Source: Manila Times June 17, 2017 14:26 UTC