A student in North Korea has been sentenced to death by a firing squad for selling copies of Netflix’s hit show Squid Game.
He is said to have smuggled the banned series into the Communist state on a stashed USB drive from China.
He was caught after selling copies to several people including fellow students, according to sources in the country cited by Radio Free Asia (RFA).
It is understood he will be executed by firing squad – one of the brutal methods by which characters in the horror series are also killed.
Seven other students who watched Squid Game in secret were also punished, while teachers at the school were fired.
One person who purchased the copy received a life sentence, while his friends who watched it were given five years hard labour, RFA reported.
Officials are now carrying out searches at the students’ school to find anymore foreign media, which is strictly banned in the reclusive country.
Despite leader Kim Jong-un’s strict censorship laws, copies of the South Korean drama are said to be spreading among people in the north on flash drives and SD cards.
A police officer in the North Hamgyong province told RFA on Monday: ‘This all started last week when a high school student secretly bought a USB flash drive containing the South Korean drama Squid Game and watched it with one of his best friends in class.
‘The friend told several other students, who became interested, and they shared the flash drive with them.
‘They were caught by the censors in 109 Sangmu, who had received a tipoff.’ ( 109 Sangmu, officially known as Surveillance Bureau Group 109, is a specialized government strike force that hunts down illegal video watchers.)
Sources said Squid Game’s dystopian world, in which indebted people are pitted against each other in children’s games with deadly stakes, clearly resonates with North Koreans living under dictatorship.
The arrests mark the first time that North Korea is applying its ‘Law on the Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture’ in a case involving minors, according to an RFA source.
Man to be executed after smuggling copies of Squid Game into North Korea
He is said to have smuggled the banned series into the Communist state on a stashed USB drive from China.
He was caught after selling copies to several people including fellow students, according to sources in the country cited by Radio Free Asia (RFA).
It is understood he will be executed by firing squad – one of the brutal methods by which characters in the horror series are also killed.
Seven other students who watched Squid Game in secret were also punished, while teachers at the school were fired.
One person who purchased the copy received a life sentence, while his friends who watched it were given five years hard labour, RFA reported.
Officials are now carrying out searches at the students’ school to find anymore foreign media, which is strictly banned in the reclusive country.
Despite leader Kim Jong-un’s strict censorship laws, copies of the South Korean drama are said to be spreading among people in the north on flash drives and SD cards.
A police officer in the North Hamgyong province told RFA on Monday: ‘This all started last week when a high school student secretly bought a USB flash drive containing the South Korean drama Squid Game and watched it with one of his best friends in class.
‘The friend told several other students, who became interested, and they shared the flash drive with them.
‘They were caught by the censors in 109 Sangmu, who had received a tipoff.’ ( 109 Sangmu, officially known as Surveillance Bureau Group 109, is a specialized government strike force that hunts down illegal video watchers.)
Sources said Squid Game’s dystopian world, in which indebted people are pitted against each other in children’s games with deadly stakes, clearly resonates with North Koreans living under dictatorship.
The arrests mark the first time that North Korea is applying its ‘Law on the Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture’ in a case involving minors, according to an RFA source.
Man to be executed after smuggling copies of Squid Game into North Korea
Nah, breh. It's a South Korean show. There's no Netflix in North Korea. The way NK got they country on lock and OD on censorship, you'll probably never see whatever they got for mass media. I bet a family over there caught watching Squid Game would get sent to a fukkin' prison camp.
