South Korean POWs abandoned for decades in North Korea

At the age of 92, Lee Dae-bong doesn't particularly enjoy getting out of bed. He has lived enough of a life. As he readjusts his pyjamas, his left hand reveals three missing fingers.

His injury is not the result of the war he fought, but the subsequent 54 years he was forced to toil in a North Korean coal mine.

The former South Korean soldier was captured during the Korean War by Chinese troops, who were fighting alongside North Korea. It was 28 June 1953; the first day of the battle of Arrowhead Hill, and less than a month before the armistice brought an end to three brutal years of fighting.

All, bar three of his platoon, were killed that day. As he and the two other survivors were loaded onto a cargo train, he assumed they were heading home to South Korea, but the train veered North, to the Aoji coal mine, where he would spend most of his life. His family was told he had been killed in combat.

Between 50,000 and 80,000 South Korean soldiers were held captive in North Korea after the Korean War ended with an armistice agreement that divided the peninsula.

A peace treaty never followed, and the prisoners have never been returned. Mr Lee was one of the very few who managed to plot his own escape.