As he ambled past a column, a backpack slung over one shoulder, a woman approached him and wiped an oily substance on his face before disappearing, her unusual actions caught on CCTV. Moments later, another woman came from behind and covered his eyes with her hands. She then slid them down over his mouth, quickly apologised and walked away.
The traveller was Kim Jong-nam, half brother of Kim Jong-un and one-time heir to the North Korean leadership who had since fallen out of favour with his powerful family. As the attack was carried out, in scenes that would not be out of place in a James Bond film, at least four North Korean agents were hiding nearby to witness the public killing and ready with a back-up plan if anything went wrong.
In the hours after the attack, those agents passed through immigration checkpoints and boarded flights out of the country, accompanied by a North Korean diplomat. Their flight routes back to Pyongyang were carefully calculated to avoid countries that may ground their planes and arrest the men.
“The reason to do it publicly is to leave a calling card, to show the world that Kim Jong-un is not afraid to use a weapon of mass destruction at a crowded international airport,” said Vipin Narang, a politics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Indeed, the people who would find themselves on trial for the murder were not agents of the North Korean state but two former escorts, Siti Aisyah, from Indonesia, and Doan Thi Huong, from Vietnam. The women, according to their testimonies, had been unknowingly groomed as killers by North Korean agents in the months previous. It was Siti and Doan who had smeared the substance on Kim Jong-nam’s face, later both telling Malaysian police they thought they were carrying out a prank for a Japanese YouTube show.
Death and a diplomatic crisis
The killing of Kim Jong-nam on foreign soil caused a major diplomatic crisis between North Korea and Malaysia, with Malaysia expelling the North Korean ambassador, refusing to release Kim Jong-nam’s body to Pyongyang and demanding three North Koreans hiding in the embassy come in for questioning by the police, to which North Korea responded by holding hostage all Malaysians in North Korea.
However, in the two years since the murder, behind-the-scenes diplomacy has taken over and appears to have significantly influenced how events have unfolded in the courtroom.
After a judge ruled that both Siti and Doan should testify, a full-blown diplomatic campaign began in Indonesia. President Jokowi met the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, twice in 2018 to press for Siti’s release. It proved effective; in an order signed by the attorney general that cited the “good relations” between Malaysia and Indonesia
, Siti was acquitted in March.
But it is not just Indonesia the Malaysian government has been accused of appeasing. The decision to let Siti go and allow Doan to plead guilty to a lesser charge has led to accusations that the Malaysian government wanted to be done with the trial because it was diplomatically inconvenient. Before the assassination, North Korea and Malaysia had four decades of good diplomatic and trade ties, which were strengthened under Mahathir the first time he was in power in the 1990s. It is believed that Mahathir, who took power again in May last year, was keen to recover the relationship.
“What is now clear is that the Malaysian government considered the recovery of the relationship between Pyongyang and Kuala Lumpur to be more important than justice for the assassination of Kim Jong-nam,” said Dr Nam Sung-wook, a professor at Korea University who previously worked in South Korea’s Intelligence agency. “Kim Jong-un’s status is on the rise now he is meeting with the US president and the Vietnamese prime minister and leaders in the region, and Malaysia also wants to be part of this conversation.”
A UN report, released in March, which investigated violations of the UN arms embargo and financial sanctions against North Korea, named Malaysia as one of the key culprits, singling out several Malaysian companies and senior business figures who had benefited from clandestine deals.
“Some members of the ruling party are deeply involved in financial networks that are partly North Korean so the government clearly don’t want to alienate North Korea with this trial dragging on; it will cost them money and embarrassment and perhaps even international sanctions,” said Dr Remco Breuker, an expert on North Korea at Leiden University.
‘Washing away North Korea’s sins’
From his birth in 1971, as the eldest son of Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-nam was slated to rule North Korea. But after being sent to a Swiss boarding school, he developed a taste for luxury items and a decadent lifestyle. In 2001, in an incident seen to embarrass his family, Kim Jong-nam was arrested trying to enter Japan to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He later spoke publicly about his belief in political and economic reform for North Korea.
But he was still seen as a potential rival to his younger brother, Kim Jong-un. There were at least two botched assassination attempts against him in 2010 and 2012 and Kim Jong-un was rumoured to have issued a standing order to kill his older brother.
