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“I watched a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber: parents, one son and a daughter,” he said.

“The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save the kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing.

“For the first time it hit me that even prisoners are capable of powerful human affection.”

A former member of the North Korean military recounted his involvement in similar experiments on an island off the west coast of the Korean peninsula. It has parallels with a report issued by a human rights group in Seoul in June that claimed the North was carrying out chemical and biological weapons experiments on disabled children on an island off South Hamgyong Province.

The report said the claims of political prisoners being used as test subjects for chemical weapons were “extremely difficult to confirm.”

However, it added: “Taken as a whole, and within the context of what is currently known about the treatment of political prisoners, such reports suggest a long-standing policy of low-level lethal testing of chemical agents on unwilling human subjects.”

The study suggested that North Korea was able to manufacture 4,500 tons of chemical agents a year, but had the capacity to increase that up to 12,000 tons a year in the event of war.

The chemicals the regime was producing included hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, sarin, tabun, chlorine and a number of agents from the mustard gas family.

The report added that North Korea had reportedly provided chemical weapons or technology for chemical weapons to Egypt, Iran, Libya and Syria since the 1990s.

The Daily Telegraph