SEOUL: An international media frenzy over reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s uncle had been thrown to a pack of dogs appears to have originated as satire on a Chinese microblogging website.

The story, which spread like wildfire after it was picked up by a Hong Kong-based newspaper, has created an image that Pyongyang’s young ruler is even more brutal and unpredictable than previously believed.

While North Korea has said it purged and executed Kim’s uncle, Jang Song Thaek, last month, it did not release details of how the man who was once the second most powerful figure in the isolated country was killed.

Initial speculation was that Jang had been killed by firing squad, a fate that media outlets said was the usual one reserved for “traitors.” But an alternative narrative of the 67-year old’s death emerged on what appears to have been a satirical post on the Chinese Tencent Weibo site that has been repeated by many media outlets worldwide.

The Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po newspaper released an article and a screenshot of the Weibo post which it used to justify its report that Jang had been torn apart.

Wen Wei Po, although independent, is viewed as being pro-Beijing. Its report was in turn picked up 12 days later by the Singapore-based Straits Times and then by a wide range of US and European media from print to television.

Separately, Dennis Rodman said Monday that a game he and other former National Basketball Association players are planning in North Korea will be a “birthday present” for one of their most unlikely fans: Kim Jong Un.

Rodman’s squad will play against a team of North Koreans on Wednesday, which is believed to be Kim’s birthday. The former NBA players, who arrived in Pyongyang on Monday, also include Eric “Sleepy” Floyd, guard Doug Christie and Charles D. Smith, who played for the New York Knicks. Four streetballers are also on the squad.