North Korea reportedly hands Trump another big win by releasing US prisoners

North Korea has released three US citizens who were detained in the country for years, according to several media reports.

The releases meet some of President Donald Trump demands for Pyongyang to demonstrate sincerity before a historic meeting later this year between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The three citizens Kim Dong-chul, Kim Sang-duk, and Kim Hak-song have been released from a labor camp and given health treatment and ideological education in Pyongyang, the Financial Times reported, citing a South Korean activist who campaigns for the release of people detained in North Korea.

"We heard it through our sources in North Korea late last month," the activist, Choi Sung-ryong, told the news outlet. "We believe that Mr. Trump can take them back on the day of the US-North Korea summit or he can send an envoy to take them back to the US before the summit."

Trump's hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, has recently called for the release of the American detainees.

The Financial Times report said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke with Kim about the detainees during the pair's secretive meeting last month.

In June, Otto Warmbier, an American university student detained in North Korea, died days after being returned to his family in the US while in a coma.

The South Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo said the three US citizens might be being coached to say that human-rights abuses did not occur while they were in North Korean custody.

North Korea operates several prison camps that have been compared to Auschwitz, the former Nazi concentration camp in Poland.

If North Korea has indeed released the three Americans and is preparing to give them to the US, it would represent the latest concession Pyongyang has agreed to make ahead of a summit with Trump.

North Korea has signaled that it is committed to denuclearization and said it would freeze its nuclear and missile tests, though it has dropped a demand for the withdrawal of US forces from the Korean Peninsula and avoided calling for an end to the US's annual military exercises with South Korea as a condition for giving up its nuclear program.