KUALA LUMPUR, (MILLAT/APP/AFP) – Malaysian police
probing the killing of the half-brother of North Korea’s leader arrested a woman Wednesday as they tried to unravel a Cold War-style assassination the South said was
carried out by Pyongyang’s agents.
As Seoul pointed the finger at poison-wielding female spies from North of
their shared border, police in Kuala Lumpur said they were holding a woman with
a Vietnamese passport.
Her arrest came around 24 hours after news broke of the death of Kim
Jong-Nam, the elder sibling of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, with reports
saying female assassins had sprayed toxins in his face at Kuala Lumpur
International Airport.
CCTV images that emerged in Malaysian media, purportedly of one of the
suspects, showed an Asian woman wearing a white top with the letters “LOL”
emblazoned on the front.
Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said 28-year-old Doan Thi Huong was
arrested at the airport on Wednesday morning — two days after the killing.
The suspect was “positively identifed from the CCTV footage at the airport
and was alone at the time of arrest,” Khalid said in a statement.
Meanwhile, pathologists in the Malaysian capital were examining the body
for clues as to how he died, in a killing that has echoes of Soviet-era
spycraft.
If confirmed, the assassination, which analysts said could have been
ordered over reports he was readying to defect, would be the highest-profile
death on Kim Jong-Un’s watch since the 2013 execution of his uncle, Jang
Song-Thaek, in a country with a long record of meting out brutal deaths.
– Seizure –
===========
South Korea’s spy chief Lee Byung-Ho said the two women struck on Monday
morning as Kim was readying to board a flight to Macau where he has spent many
years in exile.
Malaysian police said Kim, a portly 45-year-old, was walking through the
departure hall when he was attacked.
“He told the receptionist… someone had grabbed his face from behind and
splashed some liquid on him,” Selangor state’s criminal investigation chief
Fadzil Ahmat was reported as saying by Malaysia’s The Star newspaper.
“He asked for help and was immediately sent to the airport’s clinic. At
this point, he was experiencing headache and was on the verge of passing out,”
said Fadzil.
“At the clinic, the victim experienced a mild seizure. He was put into an
ambulance and was being taken to the Putrajaya Hospital when he was pronounced
dead.”
The head of Kuala Lumpur Hospital’s forensics department, Mohamad Shah
Mahmood, was taking part in the autopsy, according to an aide.
A black Jaguar sedan bearing the North Korean flag was seen outside the
department.
– Fall from grace –
===================
Kim, 45, had at one time been set to assume the leadership of his isolated
country, but fell out of favour after an embarrassing attempt to get into Japan
on a fake passport in 2001.
Kim has since lived in exile, gaining a reputation as something of a
playboy with much of his time spent in the gambling enclave of Macau, where he
was believed to have enjoyed some protection from Chinese security forces.
Quizzed about the killing during a regular press conference, Chinese
foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing was aware of the reports.
“According to our understanding, the incident took place in Malaysia and
the Malaysian side is investigating this issue. We are following the
developments,” he said.
In Pyongyang, celebrations were under way for Thursday’s anniversary of the
birth of Kim Jong-Il, Jong-Nam’s father, with an ice-skating gala that made no
mention of the drama.
Jong-Un has been trying to strengthen his grip on power in the face of
growing international pressure over his country’s nuclear and missile
programmes, and regular reports have emerged on purges and executions.
Jong-Nam, known as an advocate of reform in the North, once told Japanese
reporters that he opposed his country’s dynastic system.
In a 2012 interview from his school in Bosnia, a 17-year-old Kim Han-Sol,
Jong-Nam’s son, said his father had been passed over for succession because he
“was not really interested in politics”.
“I don’t really know why he became a dictator,” Kim said of his uncle Kim
Jong-Un. “It was between him and my grandfather.”
It emerged Wednesday that Jong-Nam had pleaded with his younger brother for
his life to be spared after an earlier assassination attempt.
“Jong-Nam in April 2012 sent a letter to Jong-Un saying ‘Please spare me
and my family,'” Kim Byung-Kee, a member of South Korea’s parliamentary
intelligence committee, told reporters.
Cheong Seong-Chang of the independent Sejong Institute in Seoul said the
assassination was “unthinkable without a direct order or approval from Kim
Jong-Un himself”.
His killing was likely motivated by a recent news report that Kim Jong-Nam
had sought to defect to the EU, the US or South Korea as far back as in 2012, he said.