Some Chinese newspapers cited North Korean defectors...

Some Chinese newspapers cited North Korean defectors as saying that the famine in the country had gotten so bad that human flesh was being sold on the black market. According to a report issued by the North Korean Refugees Relief Fund Conference, a Chinese group established five years ago, flesh from fresh corpses or kidnapped and murdered children was available in the black market. The newspapers said that the North Korean government, to discourage the practice, was publicly executing persons convicted of trading in human flesh. The report was said to include testimonies of more than 200 North Korean defectors. In the report, one defector said that conventional meat was so rare and expensive in the North that only a privileged few were able to get it. He said that it was generally known that human flesh was sold in the black markets, but that no one admits to it in public. "When a corpse is buried tonight, the flesh will be in the black market by early morning," the Chinese papers wrote. Another defector, aged 54, said that two of his grandchildren disappeared near a shop one day and the police later found their limbs for sale as meat in the same shop. The shop owner, after admitting to having lured the children with food to murder them, was convicted and executed, the defector said.