An angry Kim Jong-un has packed off one of his officials to a gulag after a hospital he ordered to be completed was not finished on time.
The tyrannical leader of North Korea broke ground on Pyongyang General Hospital in March 2020 and asked for the facility to be complete by October that year.
The hospital still remains an unfinished and empty shell awaiting its first patient as it goes way over the leader's farcical deadline.
Reports suggest the hospital actually lacks the proper equipment to house patients and this earned one person a punishment of the penalty of death.
Condemned to death, it is believed they were attempting to fit the hospital with Chinese medical equipment rather than kit from Europe, which Kim is said to think is superior in quality.
According to a South Korea-based newspaper, Daily NK, the person overseeing the project was sent to the feared Sungho-ri in April this year.
A feared labour camp known as the "camp of no return" by Kang Chol-hwan, a defector who escaped the country.
A source in Pyongyang told Daily NK: "The chief of staff of the Heroes First Brigade in charge of building the hospital was sent to [the labour camp at] Sungho-ri in early April.
"A serious shortage of rebars was discovered during a review by the Central Committee and the Central Prosecutors’ Office."
The outlet also reported that Sungho-ri has been revamped into a place where senior officials are punished for earning themselves the anger of the leader while working on secret projects.
Alongside the official working on the hospital were nine others blamed for building material shortages on the site including steel, iron, wood, glass and tiles.
Materials are actually believed to have been stolen from the new hospital site.
This mean, the source says, the official should be able to "return to normal life at some point."
"He was sent to the Sungho-ri camp because he couldn’t be sent to a normal re-education camp," they added.
North Korea's health system has been criticised for not providing adequate care, especially for the onslaught of the Covid pandemic in the country.
The hermit country blamed its southern neighbours for the outbreak, falsely, as it was only officially announced on May 12 for the first time this year.
The empty hospital is the first of Kim's engineering exploits to go belly-up.
Similar is the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, which was supposed to be finished in 1992, but remains a 105-storey unfinished skyscraper.
