According to South Korean security sources, Kim Jong-nam, the older half-brother of North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un has been murdered in Malaysia.
- Kim Jong-nam was attacked waiting for his plane at Kuala Lumpur airport and died on his way to the hospital.
- A female Indonesian suspect and a Malaysian man, thought to be her boyfriend, were both detained. Another woman, travelling on a Vietnamese passport, and a third woman, identified from airport CCTV footage with an Indonesian passport, were arrested.
- Police say they have now finished their post-mortem examination.
- North Korea is celebrating the 75th birthday of dead Kim Jong-il, the late leader and father of both Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-un.
- The deputy prime minister said Malaysia would grant a request from North Korea for the body to be returned once police and medical procedures were completed.
- Selangor state chief police officer Abdul Samah Mat told the Malay newspaper Berita Harian it was suspected that Kim was poisoned by a woman: “Based on initial investigations we saw a woman with Korean features approach the man and suddenly covered him with a cloth.” He added that the woman later fled with a female companion. two North Korean women sprayed poison on his face.
“Kim Jong-nam told KLIA staff that his face was feeling extremely pain because of an unidentified liquid sprayed at him.
The reason for his death
It is still unconfirmed as to whether Nam was assassinated at the behest of his brother, and it would not be the first time.
- His dictator brother feared him as the other option as a more pro-China and pro-Western and liberal leader of North Korea.
- For several years Kim Jong-nam lived under the protection of the Chinese intelligence in Macao. Beijing becomes more critical to the nuke-dictator and may have flirted with the idea to use his brother as a new puppet in North Korea in the ruling dynasty.
- Kim Jong-un have acted like in a Korean royal dynasty: kill the next in line to survive as leader of the family clan.
- Already in 2011, North Korean spies attempted to murder Kim Jong-nam, but engaged in a bloody shootout with his bodyguard and Nam was able to stay alive.
It’s been widely speculated that Kim Jong-un felt threatened by his brother for many years and had been planning an assassination for a long time.
“Kim Jong-un and his aides are murderous commanders, and many times the agents of the reconnaissance staff of Kim Jong-un have made attempts of poisoning Kim Jong-nam,” said Jihyun Park, a North Korean defector based in Manchester. “The fate of Kim Jong-un, his aides, and those who obey North Korean dictators, will disappear on the day Pyongyang’s regime collapses.”
Who was Kim Jong-nam
Once thought to be the heir apparent to Kim Jong-il, he fell out of favour in 2001 after being arrested in Tokyo trying to enter Japan with a forged Dominican Republic passport. He claimed he was trying to visit Disneyland with his family.
Nam has recently spent a long time outside of North Korea in recent years, mostly in Macau and China, after being exiled by his father. Since then he has been openly critical of the dynastic family leadership, saying that he believed his brother’s reign would end in failure. He called the leadership “a joke to the outside world”.
In a 2012 email to the editor of a Toyko newspaper, Nam explained that after being educated in Switzerland he had advocated for reform and market-opening.
He had previously been the subject of another assassination plot in 2012, when a North Korean spy admitted planning to target him in a hit-and-run attack.
A report issued by South Korea’s Institute for National Security in December 2016 claimed that Kim Jong-un had personally ordered the execution of 340 people since he came to power in December 2011.
North Korean leader’s brother Kim Jong-nam confirmed killed in Kuala Lumpur, source close to Malaysian PM tells BBChttps://t.co/HCGq4Gm3aT
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) February 14, 2017