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A designer has claimed North Korean agents tried to threaten him after he set up a Kickstarter campaign to make a doll of tyrannical leader Kim Jong-un.

Karl Holmstrom, 32, who lives in Belfast, is hoping to raise £12,000 to fund a toy modelled on the dictator, but says he received two mysterious phone calls telling him to stop the project.

He claims he was also victim of a hacking attempt, but says he will not back down in his bid to make the doll.

He told the Belfast Telegraph: “The line was really bad and they had a thick accent.

“I can’t be sure these people were actually calling from the North Korean embassy.

“But then yesterday there was actually a hacking attempt on my email. I could tell, as when I tried to log in yesterday it was locked.

“I thought they were prank calls at first, but when the email hack followed, I’m not sure what to think.”

In a peculiar promotional video put together for the campaign, the dictator can be seen battling Spider-man and Gizmo from the Gremlins while the caption “come at me bro” appears.

The announcer finishes the one-minute clip with the quote: “Get your Kim Jong-un action figure today, nuclear missiles sold separately.”

Mr Holmstrom, from Sweden, said he got the idea from watching comedy film The Interview, in which two American journalists, played by James Franco and Seth Rogan, travel to North Korea to assassinate the dictator.

He has so far raised only £173 of his £12,000 target from four donations, with Mr Holmstrom saying he will give half the profit to North Korean defectors.

he does not say how much the action figure will cost, other than it will look "even better" than in the pictures.

On Kickstarter campaign webpage, he said: “All joking aside. I think Kim Jong-un is a pretty terrible dude with an even worse haircut. As a rule of thumb.

“If you're the only fat guy in a country where people are starving we can pretty much establish that you're a d******d. I honestly think there's not enough people making fun of this dweeb.”

Kim Jong-un has sparked international condemnation for a series of missile tests carried out over this year – the latest reported test on Sunday afternoon.