North Korean suspect arrested over airport assassination
Son of the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il, who fell out of favour after trying to visit Disneyland
MALAYSIAN police said yesterday that they had arrested a North Korean man in connection with the murder of the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, as a diplomatic spat over his body escalated.
Kim Jong-nam died last week after being assaulted at Kuala Lumpur Airport with what was thought to be a fast-acting poison. South Korean and US officials have said he was assassinated by North Korean agents.
Malaysian police said the latest arrest connected with the murder was made last Friday night, and the suspect was identified as Ri Jong Chol, born on May 6, 1970. He was in possession of a Malaysian i-Kad, an identification card given to foreign workers, they added. “He is suspected to be involved in the death of a North Korean male,” read a statement.
The police chief for Selangor state, Abdul Samah, said the suspect had been remanded in police custody.
Two female suspects, one an Indonesian and the other carrying Vietnamese travel documents, have already been arrested, while a Malaysian man has also been detained. At least three more suspects are at large, government sources have said.
Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, had spo- ken out publicly against his family’s dynastic control of isolated, nuclear-armed North Korea.
South Korea’s intelligence agency told lawmakers in Seoul that Kim had been living with his second wife in the Chinese territory of Macau, under China’s protection.
He had been at Kuala Lumpur Airport to catch a flight to Macau when he was killed. Samah said the autopsy report was not yet complete, but dismissed media reports that a second post-mortem would have to be conducted.
North Korea said in the early hours of yesterday that it would categorically reject Malaysia’s autopsy report and accused Malaysia of “colluding with outside forces”, in a veiled reference to South Korea.
Malaysia hit back by saying the country’s rules must be followed. The foreign ministry has yet to make any comment.
The case threatens to weaken North Korea’s ties with Malaysia, one of the few countries that has maintained good diplomatic relations with Pyongyang.
North Korea’s nuclear arms and weapons programmes have alarmed the West, most recently its test of a ballistic missile earlier this month in its first direct challenge to the international community since Donald Trump became US president.
Pyongyang’s main ally and trading partner is China, which is irritated by its reed peated aggressive actions but rejects suggestions from the US and others that it could do more to rein in its neighbour.
Yesterday, China said it had further tightened trade restrictions with North Korea by suspending all imports of coal, although it did not say why. Coal exports to China are a vital source of revenue for Pyongyang.
Kim Jong-nam was assault- ed at the low-cost terminal at Kuala Lumpur Airport last Monday. He died on the way to hospital. Last Friday North Korea demanded that his body be released immediately. It had earlier tried to persuade Malaysian authorities not to carry out an autopsy.
“The Malaysian side forced the post-mortem without our permission and witnessing,” the North Korean ambassador told reporters outside the hospital. “We will categorically reject the result of the post-mortem.”
He said Kim Jong-nam had a diplomatic passport and was under the consular protection of North Korea.
The apparent assassination is strengthening bipartisan calls for the US to relist North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, a designation lifted nine years ago. Doing so would increase the country’s isolation, while potentially complicating any future diplomacy to halt its nuclear and missile programmes.
The US kept North Korea on its terrorism blacklist for two decades after the 1987 bombing of a South Korean airliner killed 115 people. But President George W Bush lifted the designation in 2008 to smooth the way for aid-for-disarmament negotiations. The concession proved of little value as the talks collapsed soon after and never resumed.
Currently, the US considers only Iran, Sudan and Syria as terrorism sponsors. To reimpose the designation, Washington would have to determine that it had “repeatedly” provided support for acts of international terrorism. Last June, the department said North Korea “is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts” since the plane attack 30 years ago.
House lawmakers are pushing for a fresh review of the evidence. Last week’s death could make the case more persuasive.
KIM JONG-NAM, who was assassinated last Monday, aged 45, was the eldest son of the North Korean dictator Kim Jongil and half-brother of the country’s current leader Kim Jong-un.
For some years Jong-nam was thought to be his father’s preferred successor, but he fell out of favour after attempting to visit Disneyland in Tokyo, Japan, with a fake passport in 2001.
Kim Jong-nam was born in Pyongyang on May 10, 1971 to Song Hye-rim, an actress with whom Kim Jong-il had begun an affair in 1968. It seems that the birth was kept a secret from Kim Jong-il for some time. However, after learning of his son’s existence, he was said to have begun grooming him for a future leadership role.
Following a supposedly ancient tradition of raising potential successors separately, Jong-nam and his much younger half-brother Jong-un (born in 1984) seem never to have met.
Indeed Jong-nam had a lonely childhood, being restricted to just one, much older, friend and taught by his mother until he was 10 years old, though he had the run of a 990 sq m playroom, restocked each year with toys bought overseas by “gift purchase teams” from “div 2; dept 9” of his father’s personal security staff.
His favourite bedtime reading was Anne of Green Gables.
As he grew older Jong-nam showed a striking similarity to his father, from his pudgy physical appearance to his playboy personality.
According to Yoji Gomi’s book My Father, Kim Jong-il, and I: Kim Jong-nam’s Exclusive Confession (2012) based on conversations with the subject, Jong-nam claimed that one reason he fell out with his father was that after an education in Switzerland and Moscow, he returned to North Korea in 1993 bent on reform. “I grew further apart from my father because I insisted on reform and opening up the market, and was eventually viewed with suspicion,” he was quoted as saying.
In fact Jong-nam held several senior positions in his father’s regime in the 1990s, including on a committee that headed the fearsome domestic intelligence apparatus. His highest profile role came as head of the Korea Computer Centre in the late 1990s, when he led efforts to equip his country’s elite with the latest information technology. His claim that he had grown apart from his father is also thrown into doubt by reports that his stepmother, Ko Yong-hui, was at one point so worried that Jong-nam was a possible rival for power with her own sons, Jong-un and Jong-chul, that she wanted to have him assassinated on a trip to Europe.
In May 2001 Jong-nam was arrested at Japan’s Narita airport trying to enter the country on a forged Dominican Republic passport, using the Chinese alias Pang Xiong (“fat bear”), and accompanied by two women and a boy (his son) aged four. He told Japanese police that he wanted to visit Disneyland.
After being detained for several days, he was deported to China.
The arrest was humiliating for his father, who was forced to cancel a state visit to China, and it is believed that Kim Jong-un became the new heir apparent due to the embarrassment caused. By late 2003 Jong-nam was reported to be living a freewheeling life in exile in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau.
In the years before his father’s death in December 2011, Jong-nam resurfaced from time to time to give interviews.
In 2010 he was said to have told one contact that North Korea was “collapsing” and he had no desire “to take over the baton” when his father left the scene.
He became more outspoken still after the accession of Kim Jong-un, expressing the view, according to Yoji Gomi’s book, that his youngest half-brother was a “nominal figure” whose regime would “not last long”.
Of his arrest in 2001, he observed that it was common practice for high-ranking North Koreans to travel using fake identities, and asserted that Jong-un himself had visited Japan on a forged Brazilian passport.
Unsurprisingly, Jong-nam was reported to have been the target of several assassination plots, most recently in late 2012, when he was said to have fled to Singapore after South Korean authorities arrested a North Korean agent who confessed to planning to bribe a Chinese taxi driver to drive into Jong-nam and disguise it as an accident.
Kim Jong-nam reportedly had two wives, at least one mistress and several children, including a son and a daughter by his second wife, Lee Hye-Kyong.