INTERNATIONAL: A North Korean Man was sentenced to death by a firing squad after found smuggling the famous Netflix series “Squid Game”. Squid Game is a South Korean survival drama series which draws from a similarly named Korean children's game. And like the drama series, one man has risked his life to play the “real life” deadly game in North Korea.
Kim Jong-un is waging war on slang, jeans and foreign films. The country has a sweeping law which seeks to stamp out any kind of foreign influence - harshly punishing anyone caught with foreign films, clothing or even using slang. The North Korean guards were making sure everyone knew the penalty for smuggling illicit videos was death. Because of this strict law, a North Korean man was sentenced to death by firing squad after students caught watching smuggled copy of Squid Game.
The man was accused of bringing digital copies of the series back from China, and selling them on USB flash drives. The student who bought the copy was sentenced to life in prison, while six others who watched it were given five years hard labor.
Teachers and administrators at the school are also being punished, with some being fired and sent to work in mines.
109 Sangmu, officially known as Surveillance Bureau Group 109, is a specialized government strike force that hunts down illegal video watchers. While consuming media content from capitalist countries — specifically the US and South Korea — is illegal within the dictatorship and punishable by death, this is the first time the "Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture" law has been applied in a case involving minors.
According to the source, the regime will now "mercilessly interrogate" those arrested to trace every person in the distribution chain, leading to further arrests. Residents are engulfed by anxiety, as the seven will be mercilessly interrogated until the authorities can find out how the drama was smuggled in with the border closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
North Korea is taking this incident very seriously, saying that the students' education was being neglected. The Central Committee has dismissed the school principal, their youth secretary, and their homeroom teacher.
