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Scores of children who sell their bodies to stay alive have taken up refuge among the dead – believing it will keep them safe from evil.

Each day, the haunted youngsters in dirty, ragged clothes rise up from the crumbling tombs of Monrovia’s Palm Grove Cemetery shortly before dawn.

These are the lost children of Liberia, sharing graves they have clawed out by hand on the outskirts of their country’s capital, still blighted by a 14-year civil war that ended a decade ago.

As TB, Aids and heroin abuse run rife, one girl, 16-year-old Princess Chea, told us: “I’ve been sleeping here in the graveyard for five years.

“There is no other option, my parents both died after the civil war. There was nobody to protect or look after me.