A new report from the Korean Institute for National Unification (KINU) provides eyewitness testimony that the Kim regime publicly executed violators of Pyongyang’s draconian COVID-19 quarantine measures.
Reports of shoot-to-kill orders for anyone attempting to cross the North Korean border during the pandemic were previously covered by NKNews in October 2020, but new testimony in the KINU report grants further credence to these dark realities.
Public executions have long been a feature of the Kim regime’s policies – ranging from public executions of Christians for being caught with a Bible to the purging of Pyongyang’s elites to tamp down on any semblance of revolutionary spirit. A 2019 report from the Transitional Justice Working Group put a finer point on the matter – of the 600 defectors interviewed, they documented “323 reports of sites of state-sanctioned killings”. According to the same report, 83 percent of North Koreans surveyed said they witnessed a public execution.