Possession of a mobile is a capital crimeThe Korea Institute for National Unification, a South Korean government think tank, has claimed that the number of people publicly executed in North Korea for owning a mobile phone is on the rise, without giving numbers. Cellphones have been banned since June 2004 following an alleged assassination attempt on the ruling dictator Kim Jong-Il, in which an explosion on a train was thought to have been detonated by a mobile phone. Prior to this there was a GSM network in the capital Pyongyang built by Loxpac (Loxley-Pacific, a Thai-Finnish-Taiwanese joint venture) and operated by subsidiary Northeast Asia Telephone and Telecoms (NEAT&T) under the banner SUN NET. This was shut down following the train explosion, which occurred only a month after mobile phones had been made legal. While today no network is available to the general public, many phones are smuggled across the border from China, where the Chinese phone networks are reported to have an unusually strong signal strength which reaches deep inside the North Korean border zone.
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