Christians in North Korea

Eighty people have been executed in North Korea for watching foreign TV and owning bibles, a South Korean newspaper has claimed.

One execution is said to have taken place in a stadium in front of 10,000 people where the victims were machine-gunned.

The source said: “I heard from the residents that they watched in terror as the corpses were riddled by machine-gun fire that they were hard to identify afterwards.”

The scale of the executions suggests a concerted effort by Kim Jong-un’s notorious regime to stifle dissent.

The deaths appear to have taken place in areas of recent economic growth and may have been a pre-emptive move. A spokesman for North Korea Intellectual Solidarity reportedly said, “The regime is obviously afraid of potential changes in people’s mind-sets and is pre-emptively trying to scare people off,” reports the Independent.

Why the executions took place is difficult to ascertain, but the paper speculates that they may have been carried out to quell unrest and stop capitalist ideology from growing, as they took place in areas of recent economic growth.

Some of the deaths may also have been a punishment for the perceived crimes of watching South Korean movies, distributing pornography, using prostitutes and possessing Bibles.

Sources: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/11/11/north-korea-executions_n_4254893.html & http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2499811/Series-public-executions-sees-80-people-killed-North-Korea-watching-South-Korean-movies-possessing-Bibles.html