The imprisonment of Kim Dong Chul, who is of Korean origin, follows a 15-year sentence for American student Otto Warmbier

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

North Korea has sentenced an American of Korean origin to 10 years in prison for spying and stealing state secrets.

Wh​o else has North Korea locked up for 'crimes against the state'? Read more

Kim Dong Chul, 62, was sentenced to 10 years in prison with hard labour after a brief trial in Pyongyang on Friday which found him guilty of espionage and subversion under Articles 60 and 64 of the North’s criminal code.

Further details were not immediately available.

Kim’s sentencing comes on the heels of a 15-year sentence handed down on Otto Warmbier, an American university student who the North says was engaged in anti-state activities while visiting the country as a tourist earlier this year.

North Korea regularly accuses Washington and Seoul of sending spies to overthrow its government to enable the US-backed South Korean government to control the entire peninsula. Some foreigners previously arrested have read statements of guilt which they later said were coerced.

Most of those who are sentenced to long prison terms are released before serving their full time.

In the past, North Korea has held out until senior US officials or statesmen came to personally bail out detainees, all the way up to former president Bill Clinton, whose visit in 2009 secured the freedom of American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling. Both had crossed North Korea’s border from China illegally.

It took a visit in November 2014 by US spy chief James Clapper to bring home Mathew Miller, also arrested after entering the country as a tourist, and Korean-American missionary Kenneth Bae, who had been incarcerated since November 2012.

Jeffrey Fowle, a U.S. tourist detained for six months at about the same time as Miller, was released just before that and sent home on a U.S. government plane. Fowle left a Bible in a local club hoping a North Korean would find it, which is considered a criminal offense in North Korea.