North Korea announced a death sentence to a man who smuggled and sold copies of the popular South Korean Netflix web series, ‘Squid Game’ which is banned in North Korea.
The authorities caught seven high school students watching the worldwide hit Korean show, reports the RFA.
A copy of Squid Game was smuggled from China into North Korea and was sold through the USB flash drives containing the Korean show.
One of the students who bought the banned show was sentenced to life imprisonment whereas other students, who watched the pirated show received five years of hard labour.
In schools, administration including teachers were also fired and exiled to isolate parts of the country to work in mines.
According to analysts, there is a hard censorship policy in North Korea under the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un to ‘prevent the influence of capitalist countries.’
A new law which is officially named “Law on the Elimination of Reactionary Thought and Culture,” was passed in North Korea last year to curb the impact of the outer world. It carries a maximum penalty of death for viewing, possessing, or delivering ‘capitalist content’, especially from South Korea and the United States of America (USA).
