“Our church is just calling out for prayer for Laura and Euna Lee,” Pastor Chuck Wysong said this afternoon.
Ling and Lee have been held since March 17 when North Korean soldiers patrolling the border between China and North Korea detained them.
According to news accounts, the women were working on a report about North Korean refugees who had fled their homeland in hopes of finding food in China. North Korea officials charge the journalists crossed into North Korean territory “with hostile intent.”
The Central Court of North Korea sentenced Ling and Lee for the “grave crime they committed against the Korean nation and their illegal border crossing,” according to the Korean Central News Agency.
Laura Ling works for Current TV, a media enterprise of former Vice President Al Gore. She is the younger sister of Lisa Ling, a television journalist who reported undercover in North Korea for National Geographic in 2006. The elder Ling’s report exposed the hardships of living in North Korea.
“We are deeply concerned by the reported sentencing of the two American citizen journalists by North Korean authorities, and we are engaged through all possible channels to secure their release,” said U.S. State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly in a statement. “We once again urge North Korea to grant the immediate release of the two American citizen journalists on humanitarian grounds.”
Click here to read an account published by CNN News.
