- Tyrant’s regime is known for its brutal executions and Kim once had his own uncle killed by firing squad
North Korea leader Kim Jong-un is known for his notoriously gruesome methods of execution that often resemble scenes from horror films.
Ranging from public death by firing squad to execution via anti-aircraft guns, the blood-thirsty madman has been previously criticised by human rights organisations for ordering the death penalty for ‘crimes’ such as watching foreign films or violating Covid restrictions.
North Korea has been ruled by one of the world’s longest running dynastic dictatorships since 1948 – and in October 1993 the North Korean Government told Amnesty International that the death penalty is imposed rarely in ‘extremely serious cases’.
But several savage reports from the repressive country would suggest otherwise, with a recent 2023 report from the Korean Institute for National Unification (KINU) providing eyewitness testimony that the Kim regime publicly executed violators of Pyongyang’s draconian Covid19 quarantine measures.
Reports of shoot-to-kill orders for anyone attempting to cross the North Korean border during the pandemic were covered locally in October 2020, as Kim strengthened his grip over national governance.
The North Korean citizen was subject to a public execution by authorities for violating ’emergency quarantine measures’ in November of the same year.
The firing squad shooting of the man accused of smuggling with his Chinese business partners was ordered to scare other citizens into strict compliance with the totalitarian nation’s lockdown measures.
But the shocking testimony in the KINU report grants further credence to these horrific realities.
Public executions have long been part of the tyrant president’s brutal regime policies – ranging from the public hangings and children being shot with assault rifles.
In 2021, a South Korean human rights organisation documented 23 public executions in the rogue state and featured testimony from North Korean defectors who were forced to watched the executions alongside the family members of the condemned.
All 23 of the public killings documented by the Transitional Justice Working Group had taken placed since Kim, 40, came to power in December 2011 after the sudden death of his father.
One witness told the the Seoul-based Transitional Justice Working Group, the organisation behind the report, that the executions were used as a warning from the state, with students and workers being ordered to watch.
‘Even when there was fluid leaking from the condemned person’s brain,’ they told researchers, ‘people were made to stand in line and look at the executed person in the face as a warning message.’
According to the chilling report, seven executions were punishments for watching or distributing South Korean media, such as K-pop – more than any other reason.
Kim has previously described the genre as a ‘vivacious cancer’ with the executions coming as part of a continual crackdown on the music.
The death penalty punishment was also dished out for crimes relating to drugs, prostitution, human trafficking and sex crimes.
CHILDREN SHOT DEAD
Teenage school students in North Korea were executed as recently as last year after watching TV shows from the South, a report stated.
Seoul’s unification ministry drew from testimonies by more than 500 North Korean defectors in a report on abuses by Pyongyang.
It included a report of six teenagers aged 16 and 17 who faced the death penalty for watching illicit footage of South Korean TV shows and smoking opium.
The teenagers were sentenced to death in public and were immediately gunned down by authorities at an airfield in Hyesan, while residents were made to watch forcibly.
In order to escape fines, imprisonment, or worse, death, South Korean shows are smuggled on flash drives and watched behind closed doors in North Korea.
The regime members called the ‘crimes’ committed by the minors ‘evil’.
In a horrific 2012 case also in Hyesan, a child was executed with Kalashnikov rifles.
Describing the killing, a defector said: ‘Blood was splattered and flesh was tattered.
‘The authorities folded the body of the executed in half by stepping on it, and put it in a sack.
‘I heard that they threw the sack away.’
The interviewees also described the inhumane treatment of prisoners before they were publicly executed.
‘The condemned person was dragged out of the car like a dog before the public execution,’ another witness said of a separate execution in Hyesan in 2012.
Children have also been sentenced to life in prison – where they are unlikely to survive due to the poor conditions.
North Korea sentenced a two-year-old to life in a prison camp after the toddler’s parents were found with a Bible.
The plight of the child, whose entire family was also jailed, was revealed in the International Religious Freedom Report from the US State Department last year.
The publication also exposed multiple cases of North Koreans being killed for their Christianity, such as the execution by firing squad of a Christian woman and her grandchild in 2011.
FIRING SQUAD
One of the most popular methods of execution is death by firing squad, according to civilians fleeing the despot’s murky regime.
A recent Radio Free Asia report from November 2023 brought a shocking incident to light involving 25,000 viewers, nine victims, and a vengeful firing squad.
According to the report, a crowd of 25,000 people were forced to gather at the airport in Hyesan and watch the grisly spectacle take place.
The nine people left in the hands of the authorities had allegedly commit the crime of ‘beef smuggling’ – and were handed the death penalty because of it.
The victims had been reportedly operating an illegal beef distribution ring that bought and sold around 2,100 government-owned cows, slaughtered them, and distributed the meat to markets and businesses, including a restaurant in Pyongyang, residents told the outlet.
‘There were enough people witnessing the shooting scene to fill the whole mountain range,’ a resident of Hyesan’s surrounding Ryanggang province told RFA Korean.
Before the execution took place, army representatives conducted an hour-long special military tribunal and disclosed details about each person’s crime, he revealed.
‘After [that], the seven men and two women who were tied to wooden stakes were executed by military marksmen,’ he added.
‘They were shot to death for killing and selling more than 2,100 state-owned cows from 2017 to February [2023].’
The horrified crowd was surrounded by police, soldiers, and other security personnel who ensured the onlookers stayed the entire duration of the event
‘I kept thinking of the horrific scene of yesterday’s shooting, so I couldn’t sleep all night and trembled with fear,’ the resident said.
According to local reports, whenever there is a public execution, the government usually requires every able-bodied person in the surrounding area to attend.
Another horrific human rights violation was committed by the country after reports emerged that a a six-month pregnant woman was publicly executed by the regime.
The woman had allegedly been caught in footage from 2017 dancing while pointing her finger at a portrait of the country’s late founder Kim Il-sung.
This was deemed criminal enough to sentence her and her developing baby to death.
In 2013, Kim executed his own uncle Jang Song-thaek by firing squad after he was accused of being a traitor.
North Korea’s official news agency said Jang had sought to ‘destabilise the country’ to take charge through a coup.
Before his death, Jang was considered one of the most powerful figures in North Korea and he had served as a mentor to Kim Jong-un.
In a statement Pyongyang called Jang Song Thaek a ‘traitor to the nation for all ages,’ ‘worse than a dog’ and ‘despicable human scum’ who planned a military coup.
O Sang Hon, North Korea’s deputy public security minister and a close ally of Jong, was killed around the same time for supporting him – allegedly burned to death using a flamethrower.
ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNS
Defector Hee Yeon Lim reportedly claimed she saw 11 musicians accused of making a pornographic film ‘blown to bits’ by anti-aircraft guns.
‘What I saw that day made me sick in my stomach,’ she said.
Hee Yeon said she and her classmates were taken to a stadium at the city’s Military Academy where the hooded victims were tied to the end of anti-aircraft guns in front of 10,000 spectators.
‘A gun was fired, the noise was deafening, absolutely terrifying. And the guns were fired one after the other,’ she recalled.
‘The musicians just disappeared each time the guns were fired into them. Their bodies were blown to bits, totally destroyed, blood and bits flying everywhere… and then, after that, military tanks moved in and they ran over the bits on the ground where the remains lay.’
In 2015, reports surfaced from South Korean intelligence that its neighbour had publicly executed its Defence Minister Hyong Yong Chol with an anti-aircraft gun for falling asleep during an event and not carrying out instructions.
A rights group in North Korea later shared disturbing satellite footage appearing to show a group of people lined up in a military training area opposite six ZPU-4 AA-guns near a public viewing area.
A year later, a former agriculture minister and a senior education official were reportedly killed in a similar manner, ‘executed by anti-aircraft gun at a military academy in Pyongyang’ – the latter also alleged to have dozed off during a meeting.
CHOKED WITH PEBBLES
Harrowing testimonies within the Transitional Justice Working Group report described how prison inmates would be given just 20 ounces of corn each while toiling at mines, farms and factories form 13 to 15 hours a day.
Many died of hunger and diseases brought on by malnutrition, a witness said, while others managed to catch vermin and insects to eat.
‘People eat rats and snakes. They were the best food to recover our health,’ said one 46-year-old man, adding he still suffers from ulcers, headaches and back pain.
And in a shocking recollection, one inmate told of how an inmate sneaked away from his work for 15 minutes to pick fruit and was executed with his mouth stuffed with pebbles and gravel, to silence any protesting.
The victim was also tied to a wooden post and had his head covered with a hood as inmates were forced to watch the horrific scenes unfold in the Sariwon prison in 2015.
‘I still can’t forget his emotionless face,’ the witness said.
The same witness said the people organising the execution were heard violently cursing the accused and describing them as the ‘epitome of social evil’.
Corpse desecration of the executed was also described by other witnesses.
POISONING
Kim Jong-un’s estranged half-brother, Kim Jong-nam was killed in 2017 after the tyrant leader engineered the assassination of the 45-year-old.
In a report by South Korean intelligence analysts at the time, it was claimed Kim wanted the death to be so ‘gruesome’ it would ‘horrify the rest of the world’.
Kim Jong-nam was killed by two women who smeared him with what turned out to be poisonous VX nerve agent in Kuala Lampur International Airport in Malaysia.
The two women were clearly visible on surveillance footage that captured the moment they targeted Jong Nam.
They also became identifiable after neglecting to cover their faces in the moments leading up to the assassination, and after the deed had been committed.
Nam Sung-wook, a former member of South Korea’s spy service who investigated the killing, says that Pyongyang wanted the assassination to be viewed in public.
‘Pyongyang wanted to send a worldwide message by murdering Kim Jong-nam in this gruesome, public way,’ Nam said at the time.
‘Pyongyang wanted to horrify the rest of the world by releasing a chemical weapon at an airport.
‘Jong-un wants to reign a long time and negotiate as a superpower.
‘The only way to do that is to keep the world in fear of his weapons. He has a grand design, and this is part of it.’
The two women, Indonesian Siti Aisyah, 25, and Doan Thi Huong, 28, from Vietnam, were allegedly hired by the blood-thirsty despot to fulfil the public poising.
But both told diplomats from their countries that they believed they were participating in a reality television show prank when they assaulted Kim Jong-nam.
But this is not the only case of poisoning that has been linked to the leader.
According to reports, Jang Song-thaek’s wife and Kim Jong-un’s aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, died in November 2014, aged 68, from a stroke during an argument about her husband’s public execution in May of the same year.
But a defector claimed that Kim had ordered his aunt to be poisoned after she complained about the method of her husband’s murder.
Kim then ordered the remaining seven members of Song-thaek’s family to be executed.
Since succeeding his father Kim Jong-il as dictator of North Korea, Kim is thought to have killed 16 senior aides.
Capital punishment remains a divisive tool in the totalitarian state and proponents argue the brutality of methods used act as a deterrent for would-be offenders, and provide the only proportionate response to the most horrific crimes.
Opponents argue the death penalty has never put desperate criminals off from acting out, that wrongful executions cannot be compensated, and that it is beyond the purview of the state to take the life of its citizens.
As well as the death sentence reports have also exposed several abuses, such as torture, sexual violence and other inhumane treatment given to citizens in the country.
The North has even conducted medical experiments on the bodies of people with mental problems without their consent.
The death penalty remains a widely used penalty around the world in all its many forms, an insight into the many means humans have created to end life.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
