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The singer of such patriotic ditties as I Love Pyongyang and We are Troops of the Party, Ms Hyon has long been a national favourite, and enjoyed a brief period as the young Kim’s girlfriend around a decade ago. Earlier this month, though, the petite 30 year-old was forced into a line-up of a very different kind.

In an act of viciousness extraordinary even by North Korean standards, Ms Hyon and 11 other performers were executed by machinegun, while surviving band members and victims’ immediate families were forced to watch.

I wanted to go … I would have nice clothes, French make-up

The “audience” were then dispatched to a prison camp and have not been heard from since. But accounts of the massacre, as yet unconfirmed, surfaced last week in newspapers in South Korea.

The reports have shone a fresh light on one of the oddest aspects of the secretive nuclear-armed regime — the so-called Happy Corps, a cabal of female entertainers who double as concubines to the North Korean elite. They are part of a wider group called the Fifth Division, a harem of up 2,000 women trained to entertain senior figures at parties and sleep with them afterwards.

Happy Corps members are warned, on pain of death, to be discreet, but an insight into what is expected of them was given by Shu Chung Shin, a 25-year-old dancer who defected to South Korea.

In an interview with Bradley Martin, the author of the book Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader, she told how she was thrilled when party apparatchiks turned up at her college, looking to recruit large-eyed, nubile young women to join the Wanghaesan Light Music Band.