Hero’s welcome for Carter and American freed by N. Korea

Former US president Jimmy Carter returned yesterday to a hero’s welcome after bringing home safely an American national sentenced to eight years hard labour in North Korea.

Friends and family gathered on the tarmac in Boston, Massachusetts to greet Aijalon Mahli Gomes, a 30-year-old African-American man who was jailed for illegally crossing into the North from China.

The group cheered and clapped when the plane landed shortly after at 2 p.m. and Mr Carter and Mr Gomes walked out. The pair entered the airport building without talking to reporters.

At Mr Carter’s request, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il granted an amnesty to Mr Gomes, who was detained in January and sentenced in April to eight years of hard labour and a fine of about $600,000.

The US State Department welcomed his release, while stressing anew that Washington played no official role in Mr Carter’s mercy mission.

“We appreciate former president Carter’s humanitarian effort and welcome North Korea’s decision to grant Mr Gomes special amnesty and allow him to return to the United States,” department spokes­man Philip Crowley said.

Mr Gomes’s family issued a statement before his arrival, saying they felt “blessed” and thanking Mr Carter for his efforts.

“The Gomes family is enormously relieved and happy. We can’t wait to get our arms around Aijalon,” spokeswoman Thaleia Schlesinger said.

North Korea’s official KCNA news agency also said Pyongyang had expressed its willingness through Mr Carter to resume six-party talks which have been on ice since April last year.

The North has made similar declarations before but attached onerous conditions to any resumption of talks that have been ruled out by Seoul and Washington.

Pyongyang insists that UN sanctions be lifted and that Washington agree to talks on a peace treaty. In May, Mr Kim told Chinese President Hu Jintao that he was ready to return to the nuclear talks.

The latest offer came just after Chinese nuclear envoy Wu Dawei visited Pyongyang last week, and while Kim Jong-Il is reportedly on a trip to China, the North’s sole diplomatic and economic patron.

The North’s number two leader Kim Yong-Nam, who met Carter Wednesday, expressed a willingness for the resumption of the six-party talks and the denuclearization of the peninsula, KCNA said.

It said Mr Carter had an “open-hearted” discussion with North Korean officials on relations bet­ween the two countries, the nuclear dossier and other “issues of mutual concern.”

The North quit the nuclear talks, also involving South Korea, the United States, China, Russia and Japan, in April 2009 in protest at UN condemnation of an apparent missile test. It carried out its second nuclear test the following month, sparking tougher UN sanctions.

A key obstacle to restarting the talks is the sinking in March of a South Korean warship, with the deaths of 46 sailors, an attack both South Korea and the United States blame on North Korea.