Australian student says North Korea threatened to execute him

An Australian student arrested for spying and expelled from North Korea last year said he was threatened with a firing-squad execution and told not even US President Donald Trump could save his "sorry arse".

Among the crimes Alek Sigley was accused of committing was posting a picture of a toy tank on Instagram, which his interrogators told him was military espionage. Sigley, 30, was studying modern Korean literature at Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang when he went missing in June, sparking international alarm.

A fluent Korean-speaker, he had written articles for several publications and posted apolitical content on social media about everyday life in one of the world's most secretive nations.

He was detained at the university and taken to an interrogation facility in a Mercedes-Benz with a black plastic bag covering its licence plate.

A North Korean man "with a crazed expression and bulging, bloodshot eyes" began screaming at him, Sigley wrote in a column published by the Guardian on Wednesday. "You son of a bitch," he was told in an expletive-laden rant.

"Coming into our country and committing all these crimes. You think Trump or Pompeo will save your sorry arse?" Sigley recalled him saying.

Sigley was interrogated "in a room completely cut off from the outside world", with no sense of time as the lights were kept on permanently and there was no clock.

"Every day was spent writing forced confessions of my 'crimes', which became only more fanciful as time went on," he wrote.

If he denied the allegations, "they began yelling at me, reminding me that I could face execution by firing squad if I didn't carry out my 'reflection' and do it 'sincerely'."