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North Korea has been using the corpses of political prisoners to fertilise its crops, it is alleged.

The gruesome measure is said to have been used across the country, even on mountainous terrain, and led to a bumper crop recently.

The claim has been mad by a former prisoner, who survived the hell of Kaechon concentration camp.

Using the pseudonym Kim Il-soon, she said: “The lands are very fertilised, and farming is successful there because the buried human bodies serve as natural fertilisers.

“Some guards said that they should bury the bodies evenly throughout the land so that it will fertilise the entire area.

(Image: Pen News/DigitalGlobe)

“They buried people in the mountains. One time, a kid was peeing in the mountains and saw an arm sticking out because they forgot to cover it properly.”

Ms Kim made her shocking disclosure to The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) after she escaped to Seoul, South Korea.

Backing up her evidence, the committee noted that they’d had no testimony mentioning crematoria at the camp, nor could they see any such facilities in satellite imagery.

(Image: Pen News/DigitalGlobe)

Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of HRNK, said the new testimony served to remind us that, even in the midst of a pandemic, there was no respite from the crimes of the Kim regime.

“This is a regime that has preserved itself through perpetrating unimaginable acts of cruelty against the people of North Korea,” he said.

“As the world is struggling to cope with the COVID-19 crisis, the Kim Jong-un regime continues to commit crimes against humanity, brutalising and victimising its own people."

(Image: KCNA VIA KNS/AFP via Getty Image)

In its new report on the camp, HNRK described how dead prisoners were laid in shallow, hastily-dug pits and covered with only a thin layer of soil.

However, if there were too many dead, the surviving prisoners “dug a hole as big as a house” for a mass grave, Ms Kim testified.

The vegetables grown, she added, were given to the camp guards and their families, and included cabbages, radishes and spinach.

Kaechon concentration camp, also known as re-education camp number one, stands roughly 50 miles north of Pyongyang, and is thought to be holding between 2,000 and 6,000 prisoners.

Despite the brutal conditions inside its walls, the camp is actually one of the places where people are sent for less-serious crimes.

One former prisoner, Lee Soon-ok, told a US government committee in 2002 that prisoners faced 18-hour work days, shared one toilet between 300 people, and ate raw rat for sustenance.