Twenty ordinary Koreans were among a handful of people targeted by the Islamic State militant group for future terrorist attacks in a video last month, local reports said Saturday.
Korea’s intelligence authorities said they were working to verify the authenticity of the purported threat.
According to the reports, the video, posted on YouTube on Feb. 17 and soon deleted, contained the names and email addresses of 20 Koreans, with an instruction for IS followers to “kill them wherever you find them.”
An image taken from a 2013 video uploaded on YouTube shows a masked man holding the Islamic State flag.
Eleven of the 20 people listed are government officials and the rest are civilians working in media relations.
Police suspect that the IS may have hacked the data from a Korean news-clipping service provider’s computer network.
In a video posted in November, the IS had threatened to carry out terrorist attacks on hostile countries, displaying the flags of 60 nations, including that of Korea.
(khnews@heraldcorp.com)