Mick Hartley

From South Korea's Chosun Ilbo:

North Korea executed three high school students in early October for watching South Korean TV dramas and disseminating them to others, according to North Korean sources.

The North passed a law in December of 2020 sentencing people to death for distributing South Korean media content and was apparently determined to make an example of the teenagers.

The sources said the three high school students from Hyesan, Ryanggang Province near the Chinese border had gathered to watch several South Korean TV dramas and were caught sharing them with their classmates.

"The law was already in effect, and at the orders of the central government to sound the alarm, the perpetrators were executed even though they were still in high school," one source said.

Presumably they were public executions.

North Korean executioners torment condemned prisoners, mutilate them after death and force people to look at their corpses, says an investigation into capital punishment during Kim Jong-un’s decade in power.

The report by a Seoul human rights organisation says that of the public executions it has documented, the largest number are not for murder or rape, but for the crime of watching or distributing videos from South Korea.