Woman held over killing of Kim’s half brother
28-year-old was in Kuala Lumpur airport, where Kim Jong-nam was killed on Monday
KUALA LUMPUR // Malaysian police investigating the assassination of Kim Jong-un’s brother yesterday arrested a female Vietnamese passport holder. Doan Thi Huong, 28, was detained at Kuala Lumpur airport, where Kim Jong-nam, 45, the North Korean leader’s elder half-brother, was killed on Monday.
Jong-nam told medical workers he had been sprayed with a chemical toxin. He died on the way to hospital.
Security sources in Seoul believe Jong-nam was assassinated by two female agents of North Korea’s spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau.
The woman arrested yesterday appeared in CCTV images from the airport on Monday, wearing a white top with the letters “LOL” on the front.
She was “positively identified from the CCTV footage and was alone at the time of arrest”, Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said.
As the police investigation continued, a row broke out over Jong-nam’s body. North Korean government officials in Malaysia objected to a post-mortem examination, and demanded that the body be released to them. The Malaysian authorities refused.
Since taking power in 2011, Kim Jong-un has executed or purged many high-level government officials in what the South Korean government has described as a “reign of terror”.
South Korea’s national intelligence service said yesterday that the North had been trying for five years to kill Jong-nam. He was an advocate of reform in the North, and once told a Japanese newspaper that he opposed his country’s dynastic power transfers.
NIS chief Lee Byung-ho told the country’s MPs yesterday that the North had first tried to assassinate Jong-nam in 2012, and in April of that year Jong-nam sent a letter to Mr Kim saying: “Please spare me and my family. We have nowhere to go. We know that the only way to escape is suicide.” The assassination was more an indication of Mr Kim’s “paranoid personality” than a calcu- lated move to remove a political threat, the spy chief said.
However, Seoul’s spy agency has a history of botching intelligence on North Korea and has long sought to portray the North’s leaders as mentally unstable. Jong- nam, who used to be called the “Little General” and was once heir-apparent to his father Kim Jong-il, fell from grace in 2001 after he was detained at a Tokyo airport while trying to enter Japan to visit Disneyland on a false Dominican Republic passport, accompanied by two women and a child.
He and his family afterwards lived in virtual exile in Macau, Singapore and China.
Born from his father’s relationship with actress Sung Haerim, Jong-nam was a computer enthusiast, a fluent Japanese speaker and had studied in Russia and Switzerland.
He lived in Pyongyang after finishing his overseas studies and was put in charge of overseeing information technology policy.
But the eldest son of the supreme leader was already viewed as a political lightweight even before he fell out of favour.
He was close to his uncle Jang Song-thaek, once the North’s unofficial number two and political mentor of the current leader.