North Korean leader Kim Jong un and US President Donald Trump.
In a historic meeting of sorts, US President Donald Trump on Thursday announced that he will meet North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un on June 12 in Singapore to discuss the denuclearisation on the Korean peninsula. “The highly anticipated meeting between Kim Jong Un and myself will take place in Singapore on June 12th. We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!,” Trump tweeted.
Trump’s early morning tweet came hours after three American nationals of South Korean-origin returned home after North Korea released them from detention. Also Read:
This is the first time that the US President provided these details about the history-making meeting between a sitting American president and the North Korean leader over denuclearisation. Trump said he preferred the meeting to be held at the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily fortified border separating the Koreas. But the island nation was favoured by most of his advisers.
In recent months, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had traveled to Pyongyang twice to meet with Kim, in what was a precursor to the Trump-Kim meeting. Also Read: Donald Trump welcomes freed Korean-Americans’ return to US
Meanwhile, Vice-President Mike Pence revealed details about the conditions of the three Americans, saying one was evidently kept from the daylight. In an interview to ABC News, Pence said Pompeo told him that, during a refueling stop in Anchorage, “one of the detainees asked to go outside the plane because he hadn’t seen daylight in a very long time.”
In a separate interview with CBS, Pence said he also spoke with the family of Otto Warmbier, an American detainee who died last year shortly after his release from North Korean captivity. “I simply let them know that while we received this news with joy, that Otto was on all our hearts and the family was in our prayers,” Pence was quoted as saying by AP to CBS. “We got Otto home the last year, but it wasn’t soon enough.”