HONG KONG (Reuters) - China’s worst fuel crunch in years has led a crematorium to dump half-burnt corpses to try saving on diesel costs, a Hong Kong newspaper said on Friday.

Villagers in Hengyang county, in the southern province of Hunan, discovered the practice when an “unbearable stench” started coming from the site, and tried to block a road on Wednesday to stop funeral vehicles from delivering more bodies.

The village sent people to investigate the smell and the South China Morning Post said they saw “crematorium workers putting half-burnt human remains and organs in plastic bags and throwing them into a nearby ditch.”

“As the price of diesel rose, we saw more and more bags thrown out from the crematorium,” the paper quoted Xiao Gaoyi, a village representative and one of the witnesses, as saying.

China was hit by its worst fuel supply crisis in four years from October to November, as a widening gap between low, state-regulated domestic prices and market-driven international prices forced Chinese refiners to cut output.

Fuel in many parts of the country was rationed and there were long queues at petrol stations.

An increase of nearly 10 percent in the prices of domestic diesel and gasoline from November 1, the first in almost a year and a half, failed to lift refining margins back into the black.