Kim suspect says family threatened Cancer battler seeking new love for ‘dreamy’ husband
A North Korean chemist deported from Malaysia has accused police of threatening to kill his family unless he confessed to the assassination of the half-brother of North Korea’s leader, calling it a plot to tarnish his country’s honour.
Ri Jong Chol spoke to reporters in Beijing yesterday while on his way to Pyongyang. Malaysian authorities have said there is insufficient evidence to charge Ri over Kim Jong-nam’s killing at Kuala Lumpur’s airport on February 13.
Ri was detained four days after the attack but police have not said what they believed his role was.
Two women – one Indonesian, one Vietnamese – have been charged with murder after police said they smeared Kim’s face with VX, a banned nerve agent considered a weapon of mass destruction.
Ri said he wasn’t at the airport the day Kim was killed but that police accused him of being a mastermind behind the attack, and presented
He said they showed him a picture of his wife and two children, who were staying with him in Kuala Lumpur, and threatened to kill them.
‘‘These men kept telling me to admit to the crime, and if not, my him with ‘‘fake evidence’’. whole family would be killed, and you too won’t be safe. If you accept everything, you can live a good life in Malaysia,’’ Ri said. ‘‘This is when I realized that it was a trap ... they were plotting to tarnish my country’s reputation.’’
Police did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Immigration Director-General Mustafar Ali said Ri has been blacklisted from re-entering Malaysia.
Malaysia is looking for seven other North Korean suspects, four of whom are believed to have left the country on the day of the killing. Three others, including an official at the North Korean Embassy and an employee of Air Koryo, North Korea’s national carrier, are believed to still be in Malaysia.
Police yesterday issued an arrest warrant for the Air Koryo employee, Kim Uk-il, but didn’t say why he was a suspect . Police said he arrived in Malaysia about two weeks before Kim was killed.
Malaysia has not directly accused North Korea of being behind the killing, but the ministry’s statement came hours after a North Korean envoy rejected a Malaysian autopsy finding that VX killed Kim. Ri Tongil, a former North Korean deputy ambassador to the United Nations, said that if VX had been used, others besides Kim would have been killed or sickened. An author fighting ovarian cancer who may not have long to live has offered up her husband in a tearjerking essay: ‘‘If you’re looking for a dreamy, let’s-go-for-it travel companion, Jason is your man.’’
Amy Krouse Rosenthal described her illness and her marriage in a column published yesterday in the New York Times. It didn’t take long for her essay to go viral online.
Rosenthal, 51, of Chicago, said she had gone weeks without real food and often fell asleep midsentence because of the morphine she needs. Despite feeling weak, she said she had to write the essay while she still could, because she wanted her husband to fall in love again after she was gone.
‘‘He is a sharp dresser,’’ Rosenthal wrote. ‘‘Our young adult sons, Justin and Miles, often borrow his clothes. Those who know him – or just happen to glance down at the gap between his dress slacks and dress shoes – know that he has a flair for fabulous socks. He is fit and enjoys keeping in shape.’’
Rosenthal, who has written two dozen children’s picture books and a recent memoir, said she had been married for 26 years.
She wrote that on September 5, 2015 – when their daughter had just left for college, making them empty-nesters – they went to a hospital emergency room, believing she had appendicitis. Instead, it was ovarian cancer.
‘‘I have never been on Tinder, Bumble or eHarmony, but I’m going to create a general profile for Jason right here, based on my experience of coexisting in the same house with him for, like, 9490 days.’’
Her husband was a lawyer and excellent cook who painted in his spare time, she wrote. He loved listening to music, and showed up at their first pregnancy ultrasound with flowers.
‘‘If he sounds like a prince and our relationship seems like a fairy tale, it’s not too far off, except for all of the regular stuff that comes from two and a half decades of playing house together,’’ she wrote.
‘‘And the part about me getting cancer. Blech.’’