Shocked locals have discovered a bag containing 27 pairs of severed human hands in far eastern Russia.

The shocking find was made close to the city of Khabarovsk in Siberia, close to the border with China.

A local found one of the hands lying on the shore of a river, leading police officers to a bag with the other 53 hands inside.

While nobody knows where the hands came from, one theory is that they were removed by body part dealers to stop police identifying the remains they were trying to sell.

Another is that the hands were severed from dead bodies in a hospital but it is unclear why this would happen.