North Korea has sentenced to death, by firing squad, a man who smuggled copies of Netflix’s Squid Game into the country. According to a report from Radio Free Asia (RFA), authorities caught seven high school students watching the Korean-language global hit show.
Apparently the smuggler brought a copy of the South Korean dystopian movie into North Korea from China and sold USB flash drives containing the series.
A high school that bought one of the USB drives got a life sentence when six others watched the show have been sentenced to five years hard labor, and teachers and school administrators have been fired and face banishment to work in remote mines or themselves.
North Korean has regulations to keep out foreign media and anyone caught flouting the laws is heavily dealt with.
“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,” a source in law enforcement in North Hamgyong province told RFA’s Korean Service Monday.
“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,” said the source, referring to the government strike force that specializes in catching illegal video watchers, known officially as Surveillance Bureau Group 109.
The arrest of the seven students marks the first time that the government is applying the newly passed law on the “Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture,” in a case involving minors, according to the source.
The law, promulgated last year, carries a maximum penalty of death for watching, keeping, or distributing media from capitalist countries, particularly from South Korea and the U.S.
“Residents are engulfed by anxiety, as the seven will be mercilessly interrogated until the authorities can find out how the drama was smuggled in with the border closed due to the coronavirus pandemic,” said the source.
“It means that the bloody winds of investigation and punishment will soon blow,” said the source, implying that a lengthy investigation would reveal the chain of distribution as each new person under investigation would be forced to tell where they got their copy from and who else they shared it with.
In the aftermath of the students getting caught, authorities began scouring markets for memory storage devices and video CDs containing foreign media, a resident of the province told RFA.
In October, streaming giant Netflix announced that South Korean TV show, Squid Game, was its ‘biggest ever series at launch’ with 111 million fans watching the show since its debut on September 17. It also said that it will earn about $900 million in value from its hugely popular show.
Written and directed by Hwang Dong-hyuk, Squid Game is a South Korean fictional survival drama television series where contestants play a set of children’s games with deadly penalties.
