Roughly a dozen wooden boats carrying human corpses have washed up on the shores of Japan over the last two months, and authorities said they likely came from North Korea.
According to CBS News, officials have found in recent boats both full corpses as well as partial human remains. After being at sea for what appears to be weeks, most of the bodies are so badly decomposed it is difficult to determine the cause of death.
Most of the boats are fishing vessels. One sign indicated that one of the vessels was possibly affiliated with unit 325 of the North Korean army, and the remains of a flag pointed to much the same.
In recent years, autocrat Kim Jong Un has put a high priority on fishing in order to earn foreign currency for the communist hermit nation.
With the pressure on to catch more fish, many boats venture too far from the Korean peninsula, and get caught in rough waters that can be hard to escape.
"Kim Jong Un has been promoting the fisheries, which could explain why there are more fishing boats going out," said Kim Do-hoon, a professor of fisheries science at Pukyong National University in Busan,
Reuters reported.
"But North Korean boats perform really poorly, with bad engines, risking lives to go far to catch more. Sometimes they drift and fishermen starve to death."
Finding corpse-filled boats from North Korea is not uncommon for the Japanese, which have unwittingly received 34 of them this year alone. Last year, it found 65 of them, and it found 80 in 2013.
On occasion, Japanese coast guard and other officials are rescued with their crews still alive, and taken safely back to North Korea.
Sometimes North Korean boats are used by citizens to escape to China or South Korea.
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