Mick Hartley

From the Daily NK:

North Korea publicly executed two young men in Haeju, South Hwanghae province, in late May 2026 after arresting them for distributing banned videos, including South Korean content. Word of the killings has only recently emerged.

“Young men who graduated this year from a university in Haeju were abruptly executed at a secret execution site on the city’s outskirts for distributing impure recorded materials,” a source in South Hwanghae province told Daily NK on Thursday. North Korea uses the term “impure recorded materials” for banned foreign media such as South Korean films and television shows.

The two men were arrested this spring. As university students, they had organized a secret club that regularly watched South Korean videos and other banned content, then systematically shared the material with fellow students.

They went beyond watching and sharing videos. The pair also wrote and kept notes criticizing government policies, drawing on outside materials about development in capitalist societies. These writings put them on the radar of the National Intelligence Agency, North Korea’s secret police, which was renamed from the State Information Bureau at the Ninth Party Congress.

The authorities ruled that their actions amounted to a malicious attempt to subvert the state. The two received death sentences after rushed legal proceedings.

The execution took place at 10 p.m. one night in late May. Authorities forced student representatives from the men’s alma mater and provincial officials of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League, the ruling party’s organization for young people, to attend. The two men were executed immediately after their alleged crimes were read out before the assembled crowd.

Their bodies were not returned to their families. Witnesses say they were roughly handled at the site and secretly buried….

Youth league officials who witnessed the execution were so terrified that they described the night in detail to their families. The story swept through Haeju within days. People who heard the rumors were shocked that promising young elites had been branded reactionary elements and executed, shaking their heads in disbelief.

The atmosphere at universities in Haeju has frozen over since the incident. “Students are in a state of extreme psychological panic,” the source said, with some asking: “Is it the party’s grace to make us break our backs supporting the farms by day and execute our classmates by night?”

The parents of the two men reportedly wept through the night in silence after receiving the devastating news.