Sigley ‘spy’ case like ill-fated Warmbier

North Korea’s ‘lenient’ release of Alek Sigley drew comparisons to the case of US student Otto Warmbier.

Australian student Alek Sigley gestures as he arrives at the airport in Beijing on Thursday after being released by North Korea. Picture: AP.

North Korea has called Australian Alek Sigley a spy and says it showed “humanitarian leniency” by letting him go free after one week of ­detention.

Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency at the weekend said Mr Sigley was caught “red-handed” abusing his status as a student at Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang by combing through the city, providing photos and infor­m­ation to NK News and other foreign media considered hostile to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“He honestly admitted his spying acts of systematically collecting and offering data about the domest­ic situation of the DPRK and repeatedly asked for pardon, apologising for encroachment upon the sovereignty of the DPRK,” the agency reported.

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Mr Sigley had been documenting life in Pyongyang including on a blog and in tweets that were frequent and detailed, but appeared uncritical. He posted photos of buildings, restaurant menus and from inside Pyongyang’s natural history museum. He wrote about the experience of being measured for a tracksuit like those worn by the North Korean soccer team, then posted a photo of him in the red and white kit.

NK News chief Chad O’Carroll — who this year published six pieces­ of writing by Mr Sigley, with pictures — denied that what the Australian student wrote for his news outlet was anti-North Korea.

“Alek Sigley’s well-read columns presented an apolitical and insightful view of life in Pyongyang, which we published in a bid to show vignettes of ordinary daily life in the capital,” he said in a statement. “The idea those columns, published transparently under his name between­ January and April 2019, are ‘anti-state’ in nature is a misrepresentation, which we reject.”

On Friday, Australian Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said Mr Sigley’s ordeal could have ended “very differently”, which prompted speculation he may have been referring to the case of American student Otto Warmbier.

The University of Virginia stud­ent spent 15 months imprisoned there before he was released in 2017 in a vegetative state and died.

Warmbier was due to leave North Korea after a guided student tour in 2016 when he was detained at the airport, then sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labour.

He had been convicted for allegedly pulling down a propaganda poster in a Pyongyang hotel in the early hours of January 1, 2016.

North Korea released him days before he died.

Mr Sigley was detained on June 25 in Pyongyang and released last Thursday after Australia asked a visit­ing Swedish envoy to help him. He is now in Tokyo with his wife.