A U.S. court has awarded the family of Otto Warmbier $240,000 seized from a North Korean bank, court documents show, in what amounts to the latest victory in the family’s quest to hold Pyongyang to account for their son’s tragic death after 17 months in DPRK custody.
According to records from the Northern District Court of New York, Judge Lawrence Kahn approved the seizure on Jan. 13 after Pyongyang and the Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation (KKBC) failed to reply to the court’s request for forfeiture.
“Judgment is hereby ordered in favor of the Plaintiffs/Judgment Creditors Cynthia Warmbier and Frederick Warmbier with respect to the Subject Funds in the sum of $240,336.41, plus any accrued interest thereon,” the order states.
The Warmbier family initially sought over $1 billion from North Korea for the death of their son. In 2018, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said North Korea was liable for over $500 million in damages.
Pyongyang simply ignored the order, however, leaving the Warmbiers to seek other legal avenues such as working through the New York court to seize North Korean assets.
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) originally seized the funds from KKBC, and the money remained in custody of New York’s State Comptroller until the latest court order.
The judge said KKBC is an “agency or instrumentality of terrorist party North Korea” under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, a George W. Bush-era law that allows victims of terrorism to seize foreign-held assets frozen by OFAC.
Ethan Hee-seok Shin, a legal analyst at the Transitional Justice Working Group, told NK News in an email that the Warmbier family is “just getting warmed up,” pointing to some $31.7 million in additional North Korean assets currently in OFAC custody.
North Korean authorities detained Otto Warmbier in Jan. 2016 and accused him of committing a “hostile act” for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor after a trial in March 2016 that lasted just one hour.
In June 2017, North Korea released Otto, who by that point had been in a vegetative state for over a year. He died on June 19, 2017 — just six days after his return to the U.S.
Sanctioned by the U.S. as early as 2009, KKBC has long served as a critical node for Pyongyang’s overseas illicit dealings. According to the U.N. Panel of Experts on (PoE) North Korea, KKBC financed and directed Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Co. Ltd., a long-time sanctions buster that helped Pyongyang acquire material for its weapons programs.
In Sept. 2019, the U.S. sold a captured North Korean cargo ship for scrap to compensate the Warmbier family, as well as the family of Kim Dong Shik, a pastor allegedly tortured and killed in North Korea in 2000. It’s unclear how much the Warmbiers gained from the sale, but an estimate from Navy Times placed the maximum value of the ship’s raw materials at $1.7 million.
Edited by Bryan Betts
Updated at 11:59 a.m. KST to include comment from Ethan Hee-seok Shin
A U.S. court has awarded the family of Otto Warmbier $240,000 seized from a North Korean bank, court documents show, in what amounts to the latest victory in the family’s quest to hold Pyongyang to account for their son’s tragic death after 17 months in DPRK custody.
According to records from the Northern District Court of New York, Judge Lawrence Kahn approved the seizure on Jan. 13 after Pyongyang and the Korea Kwangson Banking Corporation (KKBC) failed to reply to the court’s request for forfeiture.
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