North Korea publicly executed 80 people in a stadium, some for offenses as minor as watching South Korean entertainment, according to a report in a Seoul newspaper on Monday. The daily JoongAng Ilbo quoted just a single source about the public execution, but a news agency run by North Korean defectors has reported rumors of killings in seven cities throughout the country. According to JoongAng Ilbo, 10,000 residents packed into a stadium in Wonsan and watched as the condemned were tied to poles, hooded, and then shot by a firing squad. “I heard from residents that they watched in terror as the corpses were so riddled by machine-gun fire that they were hard to identify afterward,” the source said. No one executed was reportedly guilty of capital crimes.
