US Senator had secret meeting with North Korea to free Otto Warmbier

According to Fox , the office of Senator Rob Portman revealed he met with the North Korean delegation to the United Nations in December to seek the release of Otto Warmbier, the American student detained in January 2016.

Senator Portman told Fox News that the senator in a New York meeting showed photos of Warmbier to showed that “he was a college kid”.

“This was an innocent college kid who should have never been detained,” Portman told reporters on Wednesday, while separately calling his attempts to deal with the North Koreans “futile.” 22-year-old Warmbier died on Monday, after returning to the United States in a coma last week.

Warmbier had been sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labor in North Korea after he was convicted in a televised trial of attempting to steal a propaganda banner. After Warmbier’s death, the President described it as a “disgrace” suggesting in a tweet that the efforts of China to help rein in North Korea.

The senator and his staff are reported to have stayed in close communication with the Warmbier family throughout their son’s imprisonment while pressing the Obama and Trump administrations to pursue his release. All requests made to North Korea “were either ignored or denied,”  a Portman aide said.

“We didn’t know for 15, 16 months what kind of condition Otto was in,” Portman told reporters on Wednesday.

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