A short excerpt from the long opinion in Does v. Democratic People's Republic of N. Korea, decided yesterday by Judge Timothy Kelly (D.D.C.):
In January 1968, North Korea chased down and captured the U.S.S. Pueblo in international waters, killing one of the ship's crew and taking the rest hostage. For the next eleven months, North Korea beat, starved, interrogated, and tortured the survivors to extract false confessions from them. Before the year was up, North Korea got the admission and the apology that it wanted from the United States for supposedly violating North Korean territorial waters. And the hostages, having served their purpose, were released.
This case is the latest of several in which some of the Pueblo's crew members, their families, and their estates sued North Korea under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act and state tort law. North Korea failed to appear, and Plaintiffs moved for default judgment. For the reasons below, the Court will grant their motion and award long-overdue compensation to these victims of state-sponsored terrorism.
As to the statute of limitations, the opinion says this:
