Lee urged North Korea to denuclearize and follow inter-Korean declarations of peace and prosperity. He also mentioned the death of Otto Warmbier, saying the “international community is outraged over the incident.” Lee refrained from explicitly blaming North Korea for the American's death, but pressed the regime to release the six South Korean nationals and three American citizens held captive there. North Korea flatly rejected Lee's call through an editorial released Sunday in the state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun, reiterating its warning that South Korea needed to distance itself from the United States if the country truly wanted to improve ties. South Korea “better learn history again,” the article read, adding it was “foolish” to place North Korean denuclearization as a premise to improvement in inter-Korean relations. Pyongyang blamed Washington's hawkish North Korea policy for its development of nuclear weapons. Last Friday, in its first official response to the Warmbier case, North Korea claimed innocence through its Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and accused the U.S. of leading an “anti-DPRK smear campaign by abusing the humanitarian measure” of its country, using the acronyms for its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. “We are the biggest victim of this incident,” said the statement, which was issued by an unidentified spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry. The North said it “provided [Warmbier] with medical treatments and care with all sincerity on humanitarian basis,” and that his health condition was “normal” at the time of his release.