A bag containing 27 pairs of severed human hands has been found on an island in Siberia.

All but one of the 54 hands was discovered inside a bag on a snow-covered island in the Amur River, just outside the city of Khabarovsk.

A local initially found one hand by itself before spotting the bag containing the others at the popular fishing site, around 30km from the Russian border with China, according to The Siberian Times. 

Locals told investigators they had not seen any suspicious activity recently. Police are now trying to establish who they belonged to, when they were chopped off and why.

Fingerprints have only been found on one of the hands so far, the Siberian Times reported. It is not clear if prints on the others had been deliberately removed to prevent identification