On Thursday, foreign policy watchers worldwide were stunned when North Korea announced the execution of Jang Song Taek, a top government official. Jang was the uncle of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s young dictator, and also served as vice chairman of the National Defense Commission of North Korea.

However, beyond the whims of North Korea’s leader, the Hermit Kingdom appears to have now also taken the unusual step of attempting to remove all references to Jang Song Taek from state-controlled Internet outlets, primarily the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The KCNA website, which is hosted in Japan, appears to have suffered an outage briefly on Friday, and subsequently, past articles appeared scrubbed of mentions of Jang.

As IDG’s Martyn Williams reports:

When the site came back, articles that centered on Jang were gone and several hundred other articles that mentioned him in passing had been edited to remove references to him, said Frank Feinstein, a New Zealand-based researcher who runs the KCNA Watch service.

KCNA Watch scrapes the actual KCNA site and conducts basic analysis on it—its data shows that Jang appeared 126 times in 2011 alone.

Other sites like NK Watch carried the full KCNA story about Jang and his execution, which includes lines like: