DISABLED children are being used in biological and chemical experiments in North Korea.

One witness described the children being put in glass chambers and gassed.

Most of the details come from an elite North Korean special forces defector.

Mr Im Chun-yong was privy to a wealth of military secrets and insights into the workings of the reclusive regime, reported Arabic-language news network AlJazeera.

'If you are born mentally or physically deficient, the government says your best contribution to society... is as a guinea pig for biological and chemical weapons testing,' claimed Mr Im

Even after defecting, Mr Im held on to this information for 10 years.

'It was too horrific to recount,' he said.

But now with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il's health reportedly failing, Mr Im felt it was time to speak up as he felt his former country was becoming increasingly unstable.

The former military captain described one incident that happened in the 1990s.

Mr Im claimed he watched his then-commander wrestle with giving up his mentally ill 12-year-old daughter.

The man initially refused but cracked under the tremendous pressure put on him.

Mr Im said he watched as the girl was taken away. She was never seen again.

One of his own men later gave him an eyewitness account of human-testing, reported AlJazeera.

The soldier said he saw number of people forced into a glass chamber, most of them disabled children.

'Poisonous gas was injected in. He watched doctors time how long it took for them to die,' Mr Im said.

Other defectors have long spoken about how people have been used in chemical and biological weapons tests. But Mr Im is one of the first to claim that children are being used as well.

Religious persecution

In another development, South Korean rights groups have alleged that the North has stepped up religious persecution, since Kim's stoke last year.

In one incident, a 33-year-old woman, Ri Hyon-Ok, was publicly executed on 16 Jun in the north-western border city of Yongcheon on charges of distributing religious materials, spying for Seoul and the United States, and organising dissidents.

Her husband, parents and three children have been sent to a prison camp.

'There have been executions this year in North Korea, which regards religion as a security threat,' Mr Do Hee-Yun, head of the coalition of groups probing rights abuses in the North, told AFP.

'Authorities stepped up the crackdown from late last year, and more people are known to have been executed this year - probably two or three every month,' Mr Do said.

Pyongyang approved its first official Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in 1988. But there are hundreds of unofficial 'home churches' in North Korea, according to the South Korean government.

Refugees say the officially sanctioned churches and Buddhist temples are built for propaganda purposes only.

This article was first published in The New Paper.