‘Kim killer thought the attack was just a prank’
THE miniskirt-wearing killer of the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un may have been duped into his assassination, it was claimed yesterday.
The tourist – travelling with a Vietnamese passport in the name of Doan Thi Huong – was identified from CCTV footage at a Malaysian airport.
It showed her wearing a LOL (text speak for Laugh Out Loud) T-shirt following Monday’s audacious murder of Kim Jong-nam, 45.
Initial reports accused her and a female accomplice of being North Korean agents who clamped a cloth doused in a toxic chemical on Jong-nam’s face and sprayed him with poison. But, according to reports in Malaysia, Huong has told police she arrived in Kuala Lumpur with a woman and four men for a ‘holiday’ – and was encouraged by them to take part in the attack thinking it was a prank.
It came as police arrested her alleged female accomplice, a 25year-old Indonesian mother, apparently after she was betrayed by her boyfriend. The women are accused of attacking Jong-nam as he arrived at Kuala Lumpur Airport on Monday to board a flight to Macau, where he lived in exile after denouncing his half-brother’s regime.
They reportedly fled by taxi immediately after the attack and Jong-nam died en route to hospital after suffering a seizure. Huong was arrested the following day after returning to the airport to catch a flight back to Vietnam.
‘I thought it was just a harmless joke,’ she is reported to have told officers. Her story opens up the possibility that the other five had been the real killers who had planned the execution while the arrested woman was the pawn in their plot, The Star newspaper in Malaysia reported. Police yesterday arrested Siti Aisyah, 25, originally from Serang in Banten, Indonesia, in connection with the case. Officers also detained her Malaysian boyfriend.
Indonesian Immigration Office spokesman Agung Sampurno confirmed that Aisyah was Indonesian and was travelling on her own passport. She lived in western Jakarta for about ten years before moving to Malaysia in 2013.
A manhunt is continuing throughout Malaysia for the four male agents suspected of being the ‘onlocation masterminds’ behind the brazen assassination. Medical workers also completed an autopsy on Jong-nam, but the results have not been released. Despite narrowly escaping two previous assassination attempts in 2010 and 2012, Jong-nam was seemingly happy to promote himself online.
Using a Facebook profile under his alias Kim Chol, he posted snaps of himself at landmarks, casinos and luxury hotels. His ‘likes’ include French musician Serge Gainsbourg. And in a slight on his younger brother’s dictatorship, he is also said to have liked Kim Jong-un impersonator Kim Jong ‘um’.
But his online self-promotion may have aided the killers, experts said. Cha Du-hyeogn, intelligence secretary to former South Korean president Lee Myung-bak, said: ‘I think it is possible that Kim was careless, leading to his unsuspecting death.’