Should the US retaliate against North Korea for murdering a US citizen?

Otto F. Warmbier, the University of Virginia honors student who was released from a North Korean prison last week after spending 17 months in captivity and more than a year in a coma, died on Monday at the Cincinnati hospital where he had been receiving treatment, his family said.



Mr. Warmbier’s parents, Fred and Cindy, said in a statement that their son, 22, had “completed his journey home” and “was at peace” when he died on Monday at 2:20 p.m.



“When Otto returned to Cincinnati late on June 13, he was unable to speak, unable to see and unable to react to verbal commands,” the couple wrote. “He looked very uncomfortable — almost anguished. Although we would never hear his voice again, within a day, the countenance of his face changed — he was at peace. He was home, and we believe he could sense that.”



The death was the end of a wrenching ordeal for the Warmbier family, and is likely to worsen the already tense relations between the United States and North Korea, which technically remain in a state of war dating to the armistice that halted the 1950-53 Korean War. President Trump issued a terse statement condemning North Korea, which is still holding three Americans hostage.



“Otto’s fate deepens my administration’s determination to prevent such tragedies from befalling innocent people at the hands of regimes that do not respect the rule of law or basic human decency,” the statement said. “The United States once again condemns the brutality of the North Korean regime as we mourn its latest victim.”



Former Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, an expert on North Korea who has helped free other Americans held there, said in an interview on Monday that he had met with North Korean diplomats 20 times while Mr. Warmbier was being held, and that they had never hinted that anything was amiss with Mr. Warmbier’s health.



Mr. Richardson called on the North to release the three other Americans it is holding, as well as a Canadian hostage, and to “disclose what happened to Otto, fully, to the international community.”



Mr. Warmbier, a onetime high school soccer player and homecoming king with an adventuresome spirit, was traveling in China in December 2015 when he signed up for a five-day tour of North Korea with a Chinese company that advertised “budget travel to destinations your mother would rather you stayed away from.” The company, Young Pioneer Tours, said Tuesday that it would no longer take Americans to North Korea because the “assessment of risk” was too high.