“The Canadian citizen was released for health reasons, on humanitarian grounds, based on the decision of the Central Court of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea,” KCNA reported without further details.

Sixty-two year old Hyeon Soo Lim was born in South Korea and holds Canadian citizenship. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's national security adviser Daniel Jean has been negotiating his release in North Korea since Tuesday, the AP reported.

The Presbyterian Church pastor traveled to North Korea in January 2015, in March of the same year the church announced that he had not returned from his mission. He was later sentenced to life in prison for attempting to overthrow the regime and assisting the US and South Korean governments in their efforts to lure and kidnap North Korean citizens.

The pastor had worked in North Korea before, on and off.

He is not the first Western missionary to be detained by North Korean authorities. American Kenneth Bae was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in the DPRK before he was extradited back to the US in 2014. That same year, an Australian missionary was also detained in the country. He too was later exiled.

In June, North Korea also released American student Otto Warmbier for “humanitarian reasons.”

A man sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for stealing promotional posters from a hotel has spent 17 months in prison. A twenty-two year old man returned to the US in a coma and died shortly thereafter. [celá zpráva]