Silmido agents were not death-row inmates, but civilians
The on-screen captions about the North Korea infiltration agents in the film "Silmido" have been revised 23 years after its release, and took effect on the 4th. At the request of the Silmido victims' bereaved families association, the Ministry of National Defense asked distributor CJ ENM to revise the captions in July, and disclosed the fact on the 23rd. Infiltration agents refer to personnel trained to sneak into North Korea.
The new caption states that "the portrayal of the Silmido unit agents in the film as special offenders, death-row inmates, or life-sentence inmates differs from historical fact, and the Defense Ministry's Committee for the Recognition and Restoration of Honor of Past Cases and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have established that there were no death-row or life-sentence inmates among the agents, most of whom were ordinary civilians." It also added a message offering "words of comfort to the Silmido unit agents and their families who suffered because of the film 'Silmido.'"
Released in December 2003 and directed by Kang Woo-suk, "Silmido" dealt with the North Korea infiltration agents of the Air Force's Silmido unit, established in 1968. The original caption only stated that agents of a different background from other infiltration units were unrelated to them, with no explanation of their actual identities.
The Silmido unit was created in April 1968, led by the Korea Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, to infiltrate North Korea after the January 1968 Seoul incursion by North Korean armed guerrillas including Kim Shin-jo. Enduring brutal training and unfair treatment, unit members staged an escape in August 1971, making their way to Daebang-dong in Seoul; after a gunfight with troops and police, 20 were killed. The four survivors were sentenced to death, and the Air Force, without notifying their families of the executions, neither handed over the bodies nor held funerals, burying them in secret.
In 2006, the Defense Ministry's Committee for the Recognition and Restoration of Honor of Past Cases recommended an official apology for the human rights violations in the Silmido incident, as well as the excavation of remains. In October 2024, the Defense Ministry apologized in the defense minister's name at the groundbreaking ceremony for excavating the remains of the Silmido agents.
