Continuing its decades-long effort to give tyranny a bad name, North Korea has reportedly executed a former senior official by “flamethrower.”
O Sang-hon, a deputy minister at the Ministry of Public Security was recently executed with the incendiary device, a source told South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper.
The report came amid a crackdown on loyalists of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un’s purged uncle, Jang Song-taek, according to The Independent.
As many as 11 senior party officials with close ties to Jang have apparently recently been executed or sent to political prison camps.
Jang was publicly purged in December and “executed by machine gun” after being found guilty of corruption and activities that ran counter to the policies of the Workers’ Party of Korea. It has been reported all Jang’s relatives, including his children, were rounded up and executed, as well.
O was executed because he purportedly worked with Jang to turn the ministry into a personal security division to help safeguard business dealings, according to the South Korean publication.
While the execution-by-flamethrower report could not be immediately confirmed, previous executions suggest that the North Korean leadership can be inventive when it comes to ridding itself of those no longer in favor.
“In 2012, a vice minister of the army was executed with a mortar round for reportedly drinking and carousing during the official mourning period after Kim Jong-il’s death in December of the previous year,” according to The Independent.
“On the orders of Kim Jong-un to leave ‘no trace of him behind, down to his hair,’ South Korean media reported, Kim Chol was forced to stand on a spot that had been targeted for a mortar round and ‘obliterated,’” the publication added.
North Korea ranks among the bleakest places on the planet.
It is the world’s most militarized society, with nearly 10 million active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel out of a total population of less than 25 million.
Isolated, the nation tightly controls the political expression, with those deviating from the government line subject to re-education in sprawling labor camps.
It ranks last in a worldwide Democracy Index, and there have been reports of severe restrictions on human rights and crimes against humanity “without parallel in the modern world.”
And if all that isn’t enough to coax you into booking a berth on the next Princess Cruises trip to the headwaters of the Taedong River, consider this: Nearly 1 million North Koreans have died of starvation since the 1990s, while millions more continue to suffer the effects of a persistent food crisis.
(Top: North Koreans bowing to the statues of Kim Il-sung (left) and Kim Jong-il.)
The Cotton Boll Conspiracy 
I have to think in the body of earth, this place must be located somewhere very near the anus. WOW death by flamethrower, I guess when you have killed so many people you have to come up with new and innovative ways to prevent bordem? WTF
I suppose there isn’t much else to do in North Korea except come up with new ways to kill people.
You see, there is always a niche
I read the report which recounted witness statements of mothers forced to murder their own children for the edification of party officials. Evil beyond comprehension. All those lives wasted on false wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while N Korea was left to wallow in degeneracy. Talk about priorities…
I will say that Iraq had a pretty awful record of mistreating its own citizens under Saddam. Never mind the hundreds of thousands of killed, many through the most grisly means imaginable, just the fact that Saddam would use poison gas on his own people is an indication of how morally bankrupt his regime was. Whatever the pretense for invading Iraq, I believe the US was correct in removing Saddam from power simply because he was a mass murderer who would have continued to kill those who opposed, or were believed to be opposed, to his regime.
I’m afraid we must disagree on the Iraq war. All you say is true but one can say the same thing about many other nations that are nominally close allies of the United States. Including some who supported the US/Coalition war in Iraq. What is good for the Iraqi goose is certainly good for the Saudi Arabian gander. But then that is realpolitik.
I’m not sure that we disagree. I’m not keen on turning a blind eye to atrocities, no matter whether they’re committed by friend or foe.
this is so crazy and heartbreaking and cruel. an incredibly horrible abuse of power.
Yes, a good time is apparently had by almost no one.
It is unbelievably awful. I read Escape from Camp 14 recently. Hard to know that so many people are living their entire lives in the conditions he describes.
I’m not familiar with that title; I’ll have to look it up. It is difficult when you consider how many live lives of almost unimaginable suffering.
I first read The Orphan Master’s Son and then Escape from Camp 14. Unforgettable horror.