Inmates in North Korea’s prison camps have suffered starvation, torture and other “unspeakable atrocities”, UN human rights investigators said in their first report on violations in the reclusive state.

North Korea has informed a Japanese fact-finding mission investigating the kidnapping of more than a dozen people decades ago that one of them, a woman North Korea's spies abducted when she was just 13, committed suicide at a mental hospital in 1993, a Japanese official said today.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il today admitted that spies from his country kidnapped Japanese citizens decades ago, and said at least four are still alive.