Kim Jong-Nam had pleaded for his life: MPs

seoul — The half-brother of North Korean leader Kim JongUn, who has been murdered in Malaysia, pleaded for his life after a failed assassination bid in 2012, lawmakers briefed by South Korea’s spy chief said on Wednesday.

Kim Jong-Nam died after reportedly being attacked by two women believed to be North Korean agents at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Monday.

Jong-Nam, the eldest son of the late former leader Kim Jong-Il, was once seen as heir apparent but fell out of favour following an embarrassing botched bid in 2001 to enter Japan on a forged passport and visit Disneyland.

He had since lived in virtual exile, mainly in the Chinese territory of Macau, while Jong-Un took over the isolated and nuclear-armed state after the death of his father in December 2011.

The North in 2012 tried to assassinate Jong-Nam — known to be a supporter of reform in Pyongyang — Seoul lawmakers said, following a closed-door briefing by the chief of the National Intelligence Service, Lee Byung-Ho.

“According to (Lee)... there was one bid in 2012, and Jong-Nam in April 2012 sent a letter to JongUn saying ‘Please spare me and my family’,” Kim Byung-Kee, a member of the parliamentary intelligence committee, told reporters.

“It also said ‘We have nowhere to go... we know that the only way to escape is suicide’,” he said, adding Jong-Nam had little political support in the North and posed little threat to Jong-Un.

The assassination, if confirmed to have been the North’s work, is more an indication of Jong-Un’s “paranoid personality” than a calculated move to remove a political threat, the legislator quoted the spy chief as saying.

Jong-Nam was the eldest son of Kim Jong-Il with his first wife, and in the deeply patriarchal North the first son is seen as the official heir of the family. The country’s founding father Kim Il-Sung passed on the helm to his first son, Kim Jong-Il, on his death in 1994. But the succession instead went to Jong-Un, who was born to Jong-Il’s third wife — a potential taint in his legitimacy as leader.

Jong-Nam’s family — his former and current wives and three children — are currently living in Beijing and Macau, said another intelligence committee member, Lee Cheol-Woo. —