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SEOUL: North Korea announced Wednesday it has sentenced an American man to eight years of hard labour for an illegal border crossing and an unspecified hostile act.
Aijalon Mahli Gomes "admitted all the facts" when he appeared at the central court in Pyongyang on Tuesday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported.
Representatives from the Swedish embassy which represents US interests in North Korea were allowed "as an exception" to attend the trial, it said.
Gomes, 30, from Boston, was formerly an English teacher in South Korea and described by colleagues as a devout Christian. He crossed the border from China on January 25, according to reports from Pyongyang.
The North also announced that Gomes was fined 70 million won, equivalent to about US$700,000 at the North Korean trade bank's official exchange rate.
He was the fourth US citizen accused of entering the hardline communist state illegally in little more than a year.
Three previous offenders were pardoned and deported. Analysts said Gomes may also be freed as Pyongyang seeks to improve relations with Washington.
"The North is not going to hold him for eight years," said Professor Kim Yong-Hyun of Seoul's Dongguk University.
"It is likely to suspend the implementation of the sentence and expel him as a goodwill gesture toward the United States."
A Seoul activist, Jo Sung-Rae, said last month that Gomes had taken part in anti-Pyongyang rallies in South Korea and was moved to tears by accounts of rights abuses in the North.
Gomes crossed into the North one month after US missionary Robert Park walked into the country across a frozen border river from China on Christmas Day, calling on leader Kim Jong-Il to quit because of rights abuses.
Jo said Gomes may have been inspired by Park's example.
North Korea freed Park in February without putting him on trial. Its official news agency quoted him as saying he had been misled by false Western propaganda.
In March last year the North detained two female US television journalists for illegal entry and "hostile acts".
It sentenced them to 12 years of hard labour but pardoned them when former US president Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang last August and met Kim.
After months of hostility marked by missile launches and a second nuclear test, the North began putting out peace feelers to Seoul and Washington around the time of Clinton's visit.
The United States and other members of a six-nation nuclear disarmament forum are pressing the North to return to the talks which it quit a year ago.
As preconditions, Pyongyang wants a lifting of UN sanctions and Washington's commitment to discuss a formal peace treaty.
The 1950-53 war ended only in an armistice. The North says it developed its nuclear arsenal in response to US threats and cannot give it up until these end.
"The North will find little gain in holding him (Gomes) for a long time," Yang Moo-Jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, told AFP.
"It is likely to release him in several months when the six-party talks resume."
- AFP/yb
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