Satellite images show North Korea expanding brutal prison camps rife with rape, torture and CHILD MURDER
Amnesty International have released pictures of showing that facilities, including a crematorium, are being 'upgraded' and expanded, despite regime insisting camps don't exist
SATELLITE images have revealed how North Korea is expanding its brutal prison camps, which abuse human rights with horrific practices including rape, torture, deliberate starvation, forced labour and CHILD MURDER.
New footage shows how two notorious political prison camps, known as kwanliso, are being upgraded with new facilities - including a bigger CREMATORIUM to hide the bodies of those who have died at the hand of the regime.
They conducted research on kwanliso 15 and kwanliso 25, just two of the camps which hold men, women and children - most of whom have committed no crimes but are being punished through guilt by association as family of those deemed threatening by the regime.
The photos show new guard posts, the upgrading of a reported crematorium and on-going agricultural activities.
New images have also been released by Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
Micah Farfour, Amnesty International's imagery analyst, said: "Taken together, the imagery we've analysed is consistent with our prior findings of forced labour and detention in North Korea's kwanliso, and the physical infrastructure the government uses to commit atrocities are in working order.
"North Korea has consistently denied access to human rights observers, researchers, and others, hampering investigation into the abuses committed in the camps and the rest of the country.
"However, the infrastructure required to commit the abuses documented by Amnesty International, the Commission, and others is so massive as to be observable from space."
North Koreans who have escaped from the regime describe unimaginable horrors, including rape, torture and suicides.
A former prison guard at Kwanliso 16, the largest political prison camp in North Korea, describes detainees being forced to dig their own graves and women being raped by visiting officials and then disappearing.
He said: "After a night of 'servicing' the officials, the women had to die because the secret could not get out. This happens at most of the political prison camps."
Many of the prisoners die of malnutrition and overwork in dangerous conditions.
A 2014 UN report detailed rights abuses in North Korea by a "state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world".
It said: "These crimes against humanity entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation."
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