Death of a playboy: the airport assassination

“Grabbing the attention of the world is North Korea’s strong suit,” said John Nilsson-Wright in The Independent. It managed it twice last week, first with a ballistic missile test and then with the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, Kim Jong Nam. The 45-year-old father of three was killed at Kuala Lumpur International Airport with what police believe was a fast-acting poison. The full details of the incident have yet to be established, but Jong Nam seems to have been ambushed by two women, one of whom, dressed in a white top emblazoned with the letters “LOL”, covered his face with a spray or toxic cloth. He sought medical help from airport staff before collapsing. Malaysian police have arrested four people, including the two women, one Indonesian and one Vietnamese, who have reportedly both claimed that they thought they were taking part in a prank for a comedy TV show.

According to “South Korea’s spooks”, Pyongyang has been trying to kill Jong Nam for some time, said The Economist. Exactly why is unclear, but it’s most likely just because he has “irritated his half-brother by criticising him”: he once derided North Korea’s dynastic succession as a “joke”, and predicted that the regime wouldn’t last long without reform. Jong Nam was the oldest son of the country’s previous leader, Kim Jong Il, who doted on him as a child: he apparently had a 10,000-square-foot playroom filled with toys. But as the product of a frowned-upon extramarital relationship, he was kept behind closed doors and subsequently sent away for a decade to study in Russia and Switzerland. He has spent the last 15 years in exile in Macau, a semiautonomous enclave within China. He is thought to have been living under the protection of the Chinese security services, so his murder will irk Beijing.

“By all accounts, [Jong Nam] was a bit of a playboy and a bit of a loser,” said The Observer. Despite his occasional criticisms of Pyongyang, he clearly posed no real threat to the regime. The fact that he nevertheless appears to have been assassinated speaks volumes about the “paranoid, insecure, delusional and ruthless” nature of Kim Jong Un’s regime. Since taking over as dictator little more than five years ago, the 33-year-old has reportedly executed 140 senior officials, including his own uncle. The killing of his half-brother should be seen “not as the latest bizarre quirk of a comical Chaplinesque dictator, but as another egregious example of the willingness of a very dangerous man to flout international law and human decency”.