American student held in North Korea died of oxygen deprivation, claims Coroner’s report

An American student by the name of Otto Warmbier, had been imprisoned in North Korea for nearly 17 months. He was returned to the United States in a state of coma and died shortly after. Now an Ohio coroner has released a report citing reasons for the student’s death and it states that he died from lack of oxygen and blood to the brain.

Hamilton County Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco said that Otto Warmbier’s death on June 19 occurred due to an unknown injury which took place more than a year before his death. “We don’t know what happened to him and that’s the bottom line,” Sammarco said.

However, the coroner said that due to that injury, there were complications which led to the brain starving itself from oxygen which ultimately caused Warmbier’s death.

Warmbier was a 22-year-old student at the University of Virginia who had travelled to North Korea with a tour group. When he was at the Pyongyang airport to fly back home, officials arrested him for taking back an item from the hotel which carried a propaganda image. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for his crime.

Warmbier was taken into custody in January 2016 and he was released on June 15. He was returned to the US in a state of coma but North Korea denied inflicting torture on him. North Korea had blamed botulism and the ingestion of a sleeping pill for his problems and refuted claims of torture.

“As we looked at him and tried to comfort him, it looked like someone had taken a pair of pliers and rearranged his bottom teeth,” Fred Warmbier — the deceased student’s father — told Fox News in an interview on Tuesday, alleging his son had been tortured.

In response to a question at the news conference, the coroner said there was no evidence of trauma to Warmbier’s teeth nor was there evidence of broken bones. However, the report said that Warmbier’s body had multiple scars varying in size.

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Posted by fatimaarshad on Sep 28 2017. Filed under Latest News, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.