A
Canadian pastor who had been sentenced to hard labor for life in North
Korea was released on humanitarian grounds on Wednesday, the North’s
official media said.
The
Rev. Lim Hyeon-soo, a South Korea-born pastor of the Light Korean
Presbyterian Church in Toronto, received his penalty in December 2015,
when North Korea’s Supreme Court convicted him of carrying out
“subversive plots” and committing “activities against” the country, like
harming the dignity of the supreme leadership of Kim Jong-un.
Mr.
Lim was released on Wednesday, when the same court decided to free him
on sick bail, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said. The
agency’s one-sentence dispatch gave no further detail.
The
release of Mr. Lim came two months after an American college
student, Otto F. Warmbier, died shortly after he was freed from North
Korea while in a coma. Mr. Warmbier, 22, was serving a sentence of 15
years of hard labor for trying to steal a political poster from a
Pyongyang hotel.
His death angered many Americans and eventually convinced the State Department to ban Americans from visiting North Korea.
Mr. Lim, who had
visited North Korea more than 100 times on what his church called
humanitarian missions, lost contact with his congregation after entering
the country in early 2015. A tearful Mr. Lim later appeared in a
government-arranged news conference in Pyongyang and confessed to
plotting to overthrow the North Korean leadership by undermining the
“worship” of Kim Jong-un.
His
church had supported a nursing home, a nursery and an orphanage in
North Korea since it began a mission there in 1996, when the country was
in the grip of a famine that killed thousands of people.
Mr.
Lim said during his news conference that the bags of food he had
donated across North Korea had carried the sign of the cross and phrases
from the Bible. North Korean prosecutors also accused him of helping
“lure and abduct” North Korean citizens, calling them defectors.
North
Korea, which zealously tries to shield its citizens from outside
influences, has detained several foreign missionaries in recent years,
calling them spies or agents of subversive ideas.
Kenneth
Bae, a Korean-American missionary sentenced to 15 years of hard labor
for trying to establish a secret proselytizing network, was freed in
2014, after the United States government sent its director of national
intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., to North Korea.
During
his detention or trial, Mr. Lim’s family members were not allowed to
visit him, and appealed repeatedly to North Korea to free him.
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