Deaths in North Korea’s notoriously cruel gulags stopped being recorded after dictator Kim Jong-un took control of the pariah nation, a former prisoner has claimed.

“When Kim Jong-un came to power, he questioned the officials that oversaw the labour education camps about the high death rates. The result was that prison officials were instructed not to record the deaths of overworked prisoners,” he said.

The comments, in an interview with the Daily NK news website, were made by a former prisoner of the Tongrim disciplinary labour centre in North Pyongan Province, who spoke anonymously out of fear for his family’s safety.

He claimed to have personally seen medical records while he was sick in the gulag’s clinic that showed a high death rate among patients in 2011 tailing off from 2014.

The man, who was imprisoned for a year, described a life of starvation, brutality and bribery as inmates struggled to survive long hours of hard labour on meagre food rations of boiled corn porridge.