SEOUL, South Korea -- North Korea said Wednesday that its leader, Kim Jong Un, had ordered the release of Jeffrey Fowle, one of three Americans recently detained in the isolated country, after considering requests from President Barack Obama.
Fowle, an Ohio municipal worker, had been held for nearly six months until Tuesday, when a U.S. military plane picked him up. He arrived Wednesday in Ohio, where he was reunited with his wife and three children.
His release was a move few had expected.
In early September, Fowle and two other Americans imprisoned for what North Korea called anti-state crimes appeared in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, for government-arranged interviews with U.S. media in which they asked Washington to send a high-profile envoy to negotiate their freedom.
But U.S. officials said Pyongyang had repeatedly rejected their offer to send a high-level representative.
Kim "took into consideration the repeated request from President Obama of the United States and took a special step to free the American criminal Jeffrey Edward Fowle," the North's state-run Korean Central News Agency said Wednesday in a dispatch monitored by the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
Kim recently reappeared in state-run media after a six-week absence, ending widespread speculation about his health and his grip on power. Analysts said Wednesday's statement by North Korea could be an attempt to burnish Kim's image at home as a leader capable of doing a favor for the U.S. president or to bolster his government's efforts to engage Washington in a dialogue.
The report was the North's first public comment on the circumstances surrounding Fowle's release.
Washington has not offered an explanation, except for thanking the Swedish government, which maintains an embassy in Pyongyang and has represented the interests of Americans held in the North. Washington has no diplomatic ties with Pyongyang, and the two sides remain technically at war after the Korean War was halted in 1953 in a truce.
Fowle, 56, of Miamisburg, Ohio, was released while he was awaiting trial on charges of committing an anti-state crime. He entered North Korea in late April on a tourist visa and was arrested in May after leaving a Bible at a bar. North Korea considers any attempt to disseminate Christian messages by an outsider a crime aimed at undermining its political system.
Another U.S. citizen, missionary Kenneth Bae, was arrested in late 2012 in the North. He was later sentenced to 15 years of hard labor on charges of trying to build an underground proselytizing network in a plot to overthrow the government in Pyongyang. Last month, the North's Supreme Court convicted the third American, Matthew Miller, on spying charges and sentenced him to six years of hard labor.
North Korea later said Miller, 25, of Bakersfield, Calif., had entered the country hoping to be arrested and become an eyewitness to prison life in the country. It said Miller had torn up his tourist visa upon arriving in Pyongyang in April so that his unruly behavior could land him in a prison camp, where he hoped to collect evidence of human-rights violations.
The detention of the three Americans strained North Korea's already rocky relations with Washington, which has been trying to isolate the country with the help of United Nations sanctions imposed for the North's development and testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.
Washington accused Pyongyang of holding the Americans as human bargaining chips who could force the U.S. to make concessions, such as taking part in bilateral talks that the North has long sought.
After Fowle's release, Washington urged North Korea to free the remaining two Americans. From the North Korean point of view, Fowle's purported crime was less offensive than the charges leveled against Bae and Miller.
In the past, North Korea has freed some U.S. detainees only after high-profile Americans, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, have visited Pyongyang to secure their release. But it has released others without such a visit.
In December, the North freed an 85-year-old U.S. tourist, Merrill Newman of Palo Alto, Calif., after more than a month of captivity. The North had accused him of war crimes after learning that Newman, a Korean War veteran, had helped train anti-communist guerrillas during the war. But it cited Newman's age as a reason for releasing him.
Fowle's release came at a time when North Korea appears to be seeking a thaw in its relations with its neighbors after years of escalating tensions, marked by the nuclear and missile tests.
A high-ranking delegation from the North made a surprise visit to South Korea early this month and agreed to resume high-level inter-Korean dialogue, although the two Koreas later exchanged fire across their land and sea borders. North Korea has also agreed to investigate the fates of Japanese citizens reportedly kidnapped by its agents decades ago.
A Section on 10/23/2014