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North Korea jails U.S. journalists, warns U.N
Mon Jun 8, 2009 2:36am EDT
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By Jack Kim
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea, facing U.N. sanctions for last month's nuclear test, on Monday raised the stakes in its growing confrontation with Washington by jailing two U.S. journalists to 12 years hard labor for "grave crime."
The sentence follows U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's warning on Sunday the United States was considering putting the reclusive North back on its list of states that sponsor terrorism, which would further isolate the impoverished country.
The journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, of U.S. media outlet Current TV, were arrested in March working on a story near the border between North Korea and China. The trial for the two, working for the company co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore, opened on Thursday.
"The trial confirmed the grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing as they had already been indicted and sentenced each of them to 12 years of reform through labor," the official KCNA news agency said in a brief dispatch.
The harsh sentence is certain to deepen the chill in relations with the United States which has been trying for years, with scant success, to convince Stalinist North Korea to give up its ambition of becoming a nuclear weapons power.
"We are deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said in the statement.
"We once again urge North Korea to grant the immediate release of the two American citizen journalists on humanitarian grounds," the statement said.
Clinton had also appealed for the two women's release saying the charges against them were baseless.
"(North Korea) is using the sentence as bait to squeeze concessions out of the U.S. amid heightened tension," said Lee Dong-bok, a senior associate with the CSIS think tank in Seoul and an expert on the North's negotiating tactics.
South Korean markets were for the most part unmoved by the sentencing, that came in line with expectations. A currency trader said the U.S. reaction to the sentencing and developments thereafter were more important for local markets.
Analysts say it would take it would take a military clash at sea or on the border to have a major impact on global markets.
MILITARY GRANDSTANDING
U.S. President Barack Obama at the weekend called the North's latest nuclear test, which was followed by a series of missile tests, "extraordinarily provocative" and said that this time there would be no appeasement by Washington.
Communist North Korea kept up its rhetoric which is increasingly unnerving a region that accounts for a sixth of the world's economy.
It threatened to retaliate with "extreme" measures if the United Nations punished it for last month's nuclear test. Continued...
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