2009 imprisonment of US journalists by North Korea

On March 17, 2009, North Korean Soldiers detained two American journalists, Euna Lee and Laura Ling, who were working for the U.S. independent cable television network Current TV (defunct since August 2013), after they crossed into North Korea from China without a visa. They were found guilty of illegal entry and sentenced to twelve years' hard labor in June 2009. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il pardoned the two on August 5, 2009, the day after former U.S. President Bill Clinton arrived in the country on a publicly unannounced visit.

Korean American Euna Lee and Chinese AmericanLaura Ling are journalists for Current TV, based in San Francisco, California. Lee is the news editor of the channel and Ling is one of the agency's reporters. Laura Ling is the younger sister of Lisa Ling, a special correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show and CNN, who did a documentary in 2005 for National Geographic Explorer about North Korea which involved entry into North Korea without disclosing she was a journalist. The two reporters were accompanied by two men, an American cameraman (Mitch Koss ) and a guide who was an ethnic Korean citizen of China.

...
Wikipedia