Dark Files: Public Authority — Four cases where the weapon, the paperwork and the building all belonged to the state

Dark Korea — Korean True Crime & Mysteries · Aug 31, 2026 · 2h 3m

There's a word Korean officials now use about cases like these — 공권력. Public authority. State power. It's the word you reach for when the harm didn't come from an intruder, but from the people whose job was to keep intruders out. We begin in 1968, when South Korea recruited thirty-one civilians off the street, put them on an uninhabited island in the Yellow Sea, and trained them to assassinate Kim Il-sung. The order never came. On the twenty-third of August, 1971, the men who were left mutinied and hijacked a bus toward Seoul, and for thirty-five years the state said they had never existed at…