WARMBIER v. DEMOCRATIC PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF KOREA Cite as 356 F.Supp.3d 30 (D.D.C. 2018) against prisoners, is torture under the FSIA.’’ Id. (emphases in original). [17] The TPVA lists certain purposes for which extreme and outrageous measures might be torturous, such as ‘‘obtaining from that individual or a third person information or a confession,’’ 28 U.S.C. § 1350 (note), although the list of purposes in the TVPA ‘‘was not meant to be exhaustive,’’ Price, 294 F.3d 82 at 93. In sum, ‘‘[i]n order to lose its sovereign immunity, a foreign state must impose suffering cruelly and deliberately, rather than as the unforeseen or unavoidable incident of some legitimate end.’’ Id. [18] Here, ascertaining precisely what North Korea did to Otto to cut off the blood flow to his brain, rendering him blind, deaf and brain dead, is not forensically doable, but also is unnecessary. Certainly, Otto, who was returned by North Korea to the United States with severe brain damage that eventually killed him, see Kanter Decl. ¶ 21, was ‘‘incapacitated’’ and ‘‘unable to testify about [his] experiences,’’ Owens, 864 F.3d at 787. Further, North Korea has not appeared in this case and, not surprisingly, no witnesses are available to provide any eyewitness or even hearsay evidence on this point. Indeed, North Korea ‘‘is known to intimidate defectors and potential witnesses.’’ Kim, 774 F.3d at 1048; see also, e.g., Hawk Expert Decl. ¶ 28 (‘‘North Korea is known to intimidate potential witnesses to its human rights abuses to prevent information about such abuses from reaching the outside world.’’). Accordingly, ‘‘[w]ith a dearth of firsthand evidence, reliance upon secondary materials and the opinions of experts is often critical in order to establish the factual basis of a claim under the FSIA terrorism exception.’’ Owens, 864 F.3d at 787; see also Kim, 774 F.3d at 1049 (‘‘[W]here a plaintiff has produced compelling, admissible evidence that the regime 47 abducted the victim and that it routinely tortures and kills the people it abducts, the courts can assume that the defendant probably tortured and killed the victim.’’). ‘‘In these circumstances, requiring that the [plaintiffs] prove exactly what happened to the [victim] and when would defeat the Act’s very purpose’’ of ‘‘punish[ing] foreign states who have committed or sponsored such acts and deter them from doing so in the future.’’ Kim, 774 F.3d at 1048. The plaintiffs have satisfactorily established that North Korea more likely than not barbarically tortured Otto to extract a false confession and then, after a proceeding characterized by North Korea as a ‘‘trial,’’ used Otto’s lengthy sentence as leverage against the United States to further North Korea’s own foreign policy objectives. Here, as in similar cases, reliance on expert testimony is sufficient and appropriate. See, e.g., Owens, 864 F.3d at 787; Kim, 774 F.3d at 1049 (finding sufficient evidence of torture where experts ‘‘reported that victims of forced disappearance in North Korea usually suffer torture’’ and that the victim was an ‘‘especially likely target’’). Three separate experts on North Korea confirm that Otto was tortured during different stages of his detention in North Korea. First, Otto was likely tortured while interrogated to obtain a false confession. David Hawk, an expert on human rights in North Korea who has interviewed many North Korean refugees, see Hawk Expert Decl. ¶¶ 1–4, and whose testimony the D.C. Circuit has previously credited, see Kim, 774 F.3d at 1050, opined that Otto ‘‘was almost certainly subject to harsh interrogation methods, including torture and/or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,’’ Hawk Expert Decl. ¶ 37. North Korea ultimately obtained a false confession from Otto, and ‘‘the initial or pretrial interrogation stage, when inter-