NORTH Korea sentenced a US student to 15 years’ hard labour yesterday for stealing a hotel sign.

University of Virginia undergraduate Otto Warmbier had already been induced to confess that his misdemeanour was more than a college prank, stating that “the aim of my task was to harm the motivation and work ethic of the Korean people” in a stunt he tearfully acknowledged as “the worst mistake of my life.”

A UN investigation two years ago reported that hundreds of thousands of North Koreans are held in vast prison camps, with whole families often punished to “root out class enemies for three generations,” in the words of former leader Kim Jong Il, whose son Kim Jong Un inherited the throne in 2011.