Scariest thing about North Korea's Kim Jong-un? He's totally sane

Scariest thing about North Korea's Kim Jong-un? He's totally sane | Mail Online

Judges have pronounced sentence for crimes as trivial as owning a Bible, communicating with South Koreans or Christian missionaries, or simply complaining about the hardship of life in a state where millions spend their lives close to starvation.

The prisoners — a rock stuffed in their mouths to prevent them shouting out and ‘defiling the great leader’ — are tied to a post and shot, one by one, by a three-man firing squad. 

Armed with rifles or machine guns, their killers shoot them so many times their faces are usually unrecognisable. 

The bodies are thrown into bags and dumped.

As with any ‘offences against the people’, not only are the perpetrators punished but also three generations of their families — with grandparents and children alike ‘disappearing’ into horrifyingly brutal prison camps.

Hundreds of thousands of political prisoners such as these are locked away in a network of North Korean ‘kwan-li-so’, or penal-labour colonies.

Such is the regularity of executions in these godforsaken places that according to one former prisoner, Kang Chol-Hwan, in his book The Aquariums Of Pyongyang, a bulldozer preparing some ground to become a field in his prison camp unearthed masses of body parts. 

‘Scraps of human flesh re-emerged from the final resting place,’ he remembers. 

‘Arms and legs and feet, some still stockinged, rolled in waves before the bulldozer. 

I was terrified.’