President says he believes North Korean leader knew nothing about treatment of US student

Donald Trump has said he took Kim Jong-un at his word when he denied any responsibility for the imprisonment and torture of Otto Warmbier that led to the US student’s death in 2017.

“Some really bad things happened to Otto,” Trump said. “But Kim tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.”

Kim wields tremendous power in one of the world’s last totalitarian regimes, but Trump said he believed the North Korean leader was unaware of Warmbier’s imprisonment in January 2016 and subsequent torture until it was too late.

“I don’t believe he knew about it. He felt very badly about it, I did speak to him. He knew about it, but he knew about it after,” Trump said. North Korea was a big country with a lot of people “in those prisons and those camps”, he said.“And some really bad things happened to Otto. Some really, really bad things.”

Trump’s remarks exculpating the North Korean dictator are likely to draw sharp criticism from both sides of the aisle in Congress, where there is persistent outrage over Warmbier’s treatment.

The 22-year-old University of Virginia student, who visited North Korea on a study trip, was arrested as he was returning to the US for allegedly trying to take home a propaganda poster.

He was sentenced to 15 years hard labour but was returned in a state of “unresponsive wakefulness’ in June 2017, after suffering torture in prison. He died six days after arriving back in the US. A coroner said the cause of his brain damage was unclear.

Any criticism of Trump’s comments is likely to be heightened by the fact that he invited Warmbier’s family to his State of the Union address in January, and looked up at them in the first lady’s box during his speech.

“You are powerful witnesses to a menace that threatens our world, and your strength inspires us all,” Trump said, drawing a standing ovation from Congress. “Tonight, we pledge to honour Otto’s memory with total American resolve.

“After a shameful trial, the dictatorship sentenced Otto to 15 years of hard labour, before returning him to America last June, horribly injured and on the verge of death.”

In Hanoi on Thursday, however, he struck a markedly different tone, saying he did not think Kim “would have allowed that to happen” and arguing it was not to his advantage. He suggested instead that the death was because of generally bad jail conditions. “Those prisons are rough. They’re rough places, and bad things happen,” he said.

It could be argued that Trump’s protectiveness of Kim is part of a pattern of giving dictators the benefit of the doubt on abuses. Otherwise loyal congressional Republicans have broken with him over his willingness to believe figures such as Mohammed bin Salman and Vladimir Putin rather than his own advisers and intelligence services.

• This article was amended on 2 March 2019 to correct remarks attributed to Donald Trump about North Korea’s prison camps. An earlier version quoted Trump as saying: “There are some bad people”. This has been corrected to: “And some really bad things happened to Otto. Some really, really bad things.”