TOKYO — North Korea on Saturday acknowledged that it is holding an elderly U.S. citizen and said he had apologized for committing a “long list of indelible crimes” during the Korean War six decades ago. It did not indicate whether the citizen, Merrill E. Newman, would be released.
Newman, 85, has been held in the North for more than a month after being removed from an outgoing plane at the end of a tourist trip he had taken with a friend from his retirement community in California.
Following weeks of silence, the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency on Saturday released a flurry of information on Newman’s case, including what it described as a letter from Newman detailing his violations during the war. It also released a brief video of Newman, wearing khakis and a green button-down shirt, reading from the letter and marking it with an inked thumbprint.
Although there was no immediate way to gauge the letter’s authenticity, previous detainees in the North have said they were coerced into writing apologetic letters. Newman’s letter, filled with grammatical errors and perplexing run-on sentences, appeared to be written by a nonnative English speaker.