Communists in North Korea have no qualms about denying freedom to their people. Whether it's under the guise of stopping the Wuhan coronavirus or just some negative press about their government, the tyrannical commies love to rule with an iron fist. It's not surprising, then, that North Korea reportedly publicly executed a man accused of violating the country's lockdown measures over COVID-19.
In an effort to scare other citizens into compliance, a North Korean man was publicly executed by firing squad after allegedly violating "emergency quarantine measures," Radio Free Asia reported. North Korea has declared itself to be virus-free but maintains strict lockdown measures across the country. North Korea shares a border with China, ground zero for the latest outbreak as well as other outbreaks in the past.
(Via Radio Free Asia)
In April, Pyongyang extended to the end of the year an “emergency quarantine posture” in effect since the beginning of the pandemic. Since then, it has used several incidents where people illegally crossed borders and returned to the county to introduce even stricter measures.
“Since the end of November, the Central Committee [of the Korean Workers’ Party] have ratcheted up the existing emergency quarantine measures to ‘ultra-high-level emergency quarantine measures,” a resident of North Pyongan province, on the border with China in the country’s northwest told RFA’s Korean Service Tuesday.
“They held a public execution by firing squad to threaten residents here in the border area, because there’s been a lot of contact with people on the other side of the border, including a lot of smuggling,” the source said.
An already dire economic situation was made worse in January when Beijing and Pyongyang closed the Sino-Korean border and suspended all trade over COVID-19 concerns. But smugglers who make their living by covertly ferrying Chinese goods into North Korea continued to cross the 880-mile-long border.
Fearful that frequent border crossers could bring the virus back with them from China, North Korea has imposed a series of ever harsher measures in late 2020.
Authorities beefed up the frontier guard corps with special forces and ordered soldiers to shoot anyone within a kilometer (0.6 miles) of the border regardless of their reason for being there, before deploying landmines to increase deterrence.
Despite North Korea declaring itself free of COVID-19, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his family have reportedly received an experimental coronavirus vaccine from China, though it's unclear which Chinese drugmaker's product was administered.
There are at least three Chinese companies developing vaccines for the Wuhan coronavirus, none of which are known to have begun Phase 3 clinical trials of their drugs, according to Fox News.
