About 30 middle school students were publicly shot last week in North Korea for watching South Korean dramas. The programs were stored on a USB stick smuggled across the border by North Korean defectors, according to South Korean media reports.
Although the South Korean media was unable to independently verify the report, an unofficial source from the South Korean Ministry of Unification told the Korea Joongang Daily that "North Korean authorities strictly control residents and punish them severely according to the three so-called 'evil laws'."
One of these laws is: "The Law of Rejection of Reactionary Ideology and Culture", which prohibits the distribution of media from South Korea, the USA or Japan. However, it is unclear whether these restrictions apply to foreigners visiting the country, such as schoolchildren from Russia who plan to attend summer camps in North Korea.
Greg Scarlatio, director general of the North Korean Human Rights Commission, told Business Insider that "under the circumstances created as a result of the increased suppression of information from the outside world, these reports are certainly reasonable."
* Channel 14 News contributed to this report