Tag: Silmido

Since all the commandos are dead this apology is only meaningful to their surviving family members:

South Korean commandos who died as they escaped from Silmido — an uninhabited island where they were being trained to kill then-North Korean leader Kim Il-sung — are due to receive an apology from the country’s defense chief for the first time in 53 years.

In August 1971, the 24 commandos of South Korea’s secret killer squad fled the island in protest of poor treatment, after over three years of training to infiltrate North Korea and capture its leader.

On their way out of Silmido, they killed the island’s guards, hijacked a bus to Seoul after reaching the mainland with a boat. Most of them were shot dead or committed suicide with hand grenades during a clash with the military police. Four survivors were executed.

Along with the apology, the South Korean military said it would recover the remains of the four who were executed for a proper burial, planned to be carried out later this year.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link and Silmido is a pretty good South Korean movie to watch as well that dramatizes this incident.

Guards carrying a portrait and the remains of the deceased secret commandos trained to infiltrate North Korea during the Cold War era leave a funeral hall in Goyang, north of Seoul, after their joint funeral on Aug. 23, 2017. Unit 684, better known as the Silmido unit, named after the island off the west coast where it was secretly based, was established in 1968 by the government following North Korea’s failed attempt to attack the presidential office in Seoul earlier that year, but their existence became useless amid the reconciliation between the two Koreas. The existence of the anti-communist unit had been thoroughly denied by the government, and a group of 24 surviving commandos blew themselves up while trying to enter Seoul on a stolen bus. In 2010, the court ordered the state to compensate the bereaved families of the commandos. (Yonhap)