In 2017, Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korea’s leader, was killed in a busy Malaysian airport. Two young women wiped a deadly nerve agent on his face, believing they were taking part in a harmless television prank.
It is a shocking story of family power, international tension, and a murder planned in plain sight.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are continuing our three-part mini-series on stories from North Korea.
[00:00:30] In part one, we talked about Otto Warmbier, the American student who travelled to North Korea as a tourist and returned home in a coma.
[00:00:41] In part three, we’ll be talking about Kim Jong-il’s unusual passion for cinema.
[00:00:47] But in today's episode, part two, we are going to talk about one of the most extraordinary and brazen political assassinations of the twenty-first century: the murder of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korea's Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un.
[00:01:06] It's a story involving a weapon of mass destruction, a fake reality TV show, two young women who had no idea they were committing a crime, and a plan almost certainly approved by the murdered man’s brother himself.
[00:01:23] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:29] Very few people expect to be murdered.
[00:01:32] Even fewer people expect to be murdered in public.
[00:01:37] And, I would imagine at least, even fewer people expect to be murdered in public by two young women they’ve never met before.
[00:01:47] But not everyone is the older brother of the leader of North Korea.
[00:01:53] Still, from what we know about the events of the morning of the 13th of February, 2017, Kim Jong-nam expected it to be a day like any other.
[00:02:08] He had arrived alone at terminal 2 of Kuala Lumpur International Airport. It was busy, as usual. Noisy, slightly chaotic, full of people dragging wheelie suitcases and staring at departure boards.
[00:02:26] The 45-year-old Kim looked perfectly ordinary: short, shaved hair, slightly overweight, a light grey suit, a small, dark rucksack over his shoulder.
[00:02:39] He makes his way towards the self check-in kiosks. In a few hours he will be on the plane to Macau, in south-east China, where he has been living quietly for several years.
[00:02:53] His name, on his diplomatic passport at least, is Kim Chol.
[00:02:58] But of course this is not his real name.
[00:03:03] His real name is Kim Jong-nam. He is forty-five years old. He is the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and the half-brother of its current leader, Kim Jong-un.
[00:03:18] And in a matter of minutes, Kim Jong-nam will be dead.
[00:03:25] At approximately nine o'clock in the morning, a young woman approaches him from behind.
[00:03:32] Before he has the chance to react, she wipes something on his face with her bare hand.
[00:03:39] She then turns around and walks away quickly. Moments later, a second woman approaches and does the same thing, pressing her palm against his eyes and his cheeks. She too disappears quickly into the crowd.
[00:03:58] The whole thing takes seconds. Nobody around them appears to notice anything unusual.
[00:04:06] After all, it wasn’t particularly violent. Weird and unexpected, yes, but nobody was shot or stabbed; it was like it was all some elaborate prank, a joke for a hidden camera show.
[00:04:24] But it quickly becomes clear that this is no joke.
[00:04:29] Kim Jong-nam feels it immediately. He walks to a nearby airport information desk and tells the staff that someone has sprayed something in his face, that his eyes are burning, and that he is feeling deeply unwell.
[00:04:46] There’s CCTV footage of this entire thing; you can see him gesturing to the airport staff. “Help! I need a doctor”.
[00:04:56] He is taken to the airport clinic. Within minutes, he is deteriorating rapidly. He goes into convulsions. He can barely breathe. An ambulance is called, but by the time it arrives, it is already too late.
[00:05:13] He dies on the way to hospital.
[00:05:16] The time from the attack to his death is less than twenty minutes.
[00:05:23] Now, to understand why Kim Jong-nam was murdered, and why his brother almost certainly ordered it, we need to go back to the beginning. To the strange and privileged and ultimately cursed life of the man who was born to rule North Korea, but whose fate was to be murdered in a Malaysian airport.
[00:05:46] Kim Jong-nam was born on the 10th of May, 1971, the oldest son of the then leader-to-be, Kim Jong-il.
[00:05:57] Now, as a quick reminder of some North Korean history, North Korea has been run by the same family since its founding in 1948.
[00:06:08] Kim Il-sung was the first leader, ruling until his death in 1994, when power passed to his son, Kim Jong-il, who we'll be hearing more about in the next episode.
[00:06:21] And when Kim Jong-il died, in 2011, power should have gone to his oldest son, Kim Jong-nam.
[00:06:31] But it didn’t.
[00:06:33] Now, we’ll get to why in a moment, but first, to the early life of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:06:41] His mother was a woman named Song Hye-rim, who was a glamorous and well-known actress. She was also married to another man, and was reportedly forced to divorce him before becoming Kim Jong-il’s mistress.
[00:06:57] And importantly, the pair never married, and Kim kept their relationship, and the existence of their son, secret from his father for many years.
[00:07:09] Clearly, this led to a slightly odd early existence for the young Kim Jong-nam.
[00:07:16] He did not go to school. He was educated at home by his aunt, and his only childhood playmate, for several years, was his cousin.
[00:07:28] As he grew older, however, his father started to acknowledge him and began to invest in his future.
[00:07:36] Kim was sent abroad for school, to Geneva, in Switzerland.
[00:07:41] He returned to Pyongyang in 1988 and was given government roles, eventually becoming head of North Korea's Computer Committee.
[00:07:51] He was being groomed, so it seemed, to be the next in line.
[00:07:57] He was also regarded, by the standards of the Kim family at least, as something of a reformer.
[00:08:04] He was cosmopolitan, worldly, interested in technology and the outside world.
[00:08:12] But he would also be described as sensitive, hot-tempered, and he had a weakness for a few things that weren’t exactly legal in North Korea.
[00:08:23] He was known to enjoy the casinos of Macau and the freedoms that came with living outside the hermit kingdom.
[00:08:31] He was, to use his own choice of words, a "totally capitalist kid."
[00:08:38] Unfortunately, it would be capitalism that would bring him down. Specifically, the allure of Mickey Mouse and large flasks of Coca Cola.
[00:08:49] In May 2001, he tried to go to Japan.
[00:08:55] He managed to get to Tokyo airport, but Japanese officials smelled something fishy about his passport. It was, supposedly, a Dominican Republic passport with the name “Pang xiong”, which translates, somewhat unfortunately, as "Fat Bear" in Chinese.
[00:09:17] When his true identity was revealed, and he was asked why he was trying to enter Japan on a fake passport, he famously told the officials that he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.
[00:09:31] This was hugely embarrassing to North Korea, and to his father. The son of the North Korean leader, the heir apparent to one of the last officially communist regimes on Earth, had been caught red-handed travelling on a forged passport to go to a theme park. To Disneyland, nonetheless, the Mecca of American capitalism.
[00:09:58] His father was said to be furious. All public engagements for this young Disneyland-lover were cancelled.
[00:10:08] And that, essentially, was the end of Kim Jong-nam's political career.
[00:10:15] He moved into a kind of comfortable but permanent exile, drifting around China, but based mainly in the gambling centre of Macau.
[00:10:25] His younger half-brother, Kim Jong-un, became the heir apparent.
[00:10:31] And when Kim Jong-il died in December 2011, it was Kim Jong-un who took power, not Kim Jong-nam.
[00:10:41] Now, if you have brothers or sisters, you know that the relationship can sometimes be intense. And, you might think, this relationship would only be further intensified if you think that one of you will become the supreme leader of the world's most reclusive dictatorship.
[00:11:02] But the funny thing is that Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-nam had no relationship; they never actually met. They were kept completely separate as children, so it’s not like Kim Jong-un held some huge grudge against his brother for something he did when they were teenagers, and finally decided to get his revenge.
[00:11:26] It wasn’t revenge, as far as we know it. This 2017 airport murder was purely business.
[00:11:36] For the relatively new Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, his older half-brother was a problem.
[00:11:43] He wasn’t an immediate, operational problem. Kim Jong-nam had no obvious power base in Pyongyang, no army, no political faction he could call his own. He wasn’t particularly charismatic, and didn’t seem to have any grand designs on overthrowing his brother.
[00:12:04] But he was still alive.
[00:12:06] He was still the eldest son of Kim Jong-il.
[00:12:10] And that made him, in theory, a potential rallying point for anyone who might want an alternative.
[00:12:19] There were whispers that China was quietly keeping Kim Jong-nam as what one analyst called "a spare", a sort of insurance policy in case Kim Jong-un ever needed to be replaced.
[00:12:34] That was not a comfortable thought for Kim Jong-un.
[00:12:38] And he had already shown, more than once, that he was willing to eliminate those he perceived as rivals. His uncle and former mentor, a man named Jang Song-thaek, had been executed in 2013. The message to any potential rival was clear.
[00:13:00] And there had, in fact, been multiple assassination attempts on Kim Jong-nam over the years.
[00:13:08] One reported attempt in Budapest in 2006. Another in 2012. Kim Jong-nam was well-aware of the threat. He had written to his half-brother in 2012, according to South Korean reports, begging for his life.
[00:13:27] He knew he was not safe.
[00:13:31] So, perhaps, he was one of those few people who does wake up and think there is a not insignificant chance that this day might be his last.
[00:13:42] And in fact, there is some evidence to suggest that he wasn’t merely a portly North Korean gambler; there is credible evidence that Kim Jong-nam had been working as an informant for the CIA. He had been meeting with American intelligence agents, usually in Singapore and Malaysia. Security footage from his final trip reportedly showed him in a hotel lift with a man identified as an American intelligence agent.
[00:14:18] And his backpack, which was found after the attack, contained some 120,000 dollars in cash.
[00:14:28] Whether his potential CIA connections had anything to do with the timing of the assassination, we cannot say. But what we do know is that North Korean intelligence had been tracking his movements, and on that Monday morning in February, their plan was ready.
[00:14:47] So, to the murder itself.
[00:14:51] The weapon used to kill Kim Jong-nam was something called “VX nerve agent”.
[00:14:59] It is classified by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction, and is the most toxic of all known chemical warfare agents. It looks and feels a little like motor oil: it’s sort of oily, colourless, odourless, and tasteless. It looks harmless enough, but as little as a single drop on the skin can be lethal.
[00:15:27] It attacks your nervous system, and kills within minutes. 15 minutes, in the case of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:15:37] And, just in case you were worried that you might get your cake measurements wrong and accidentally concoct a bit of VX nerve agent at home, no, it’s something that requires incredibly sophisticated equipment and expertise to make. Only a handful of countries in the world are believed to have the capability to produce it: the United States, Russia, Syria, and, of course, North Korea.
[00:16:05] Now, another perhaps unbelievable part of this story is that the two women that administered this nerve agent, the two young women who killed Kim Jong-nam, they weren’t highly trained North Korean agents.
[00:16:21] The younger one was called Siti Aisyah. She was a twenty-five year old Indonesian. And the other was a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman called Doan Thi Huong.
[00:16:36] Their story, which emerged after their arrest in the days following the murder, went like this: they had each been approached separately, in the weeks beforehand, by men they understood to be scouts for a Japanese entertainment company.
[00:16:55] They were offered money, around a hundred dollars each, to take part in a prank “hidden camera” TV show. The premise was simple: they would approach strangers in public places and wipe a harmless liquid on their faces.
[00:17:13] Hidden cameras would capture the reaction. It was all for entertainment.
[00:17:19] They had each done the prank multiple times, in shopping malls and at the airport itself, with different targets, using what they were told was baby oil or a similar harmless substance.
[00:17:34] They were filmed. The footage was shown back to them. It was a bit of harmless fun.
[00:17:40] Everything seemed above board.
[00:17:44] On the morning of the 13th of February, they were each given a liquid to apply to their hands. They were told who they should approach: that portly looking fellow with the black rucksack.
[00:17:59] They approached their target separately, each carrying what was, in effect, one component of a binary chemical weapon. The VX was only created at the moment of contact, when the two substances combined on Kim Jong-nam's face.
[00:18:20] This design was deliberate and ingenious. It meant the women themselves were not exposed to a lethal dose of VX, because neither of them was carrying the fully formed agent.
[00:18:34] It also gave them genuine, believable ignorance.
[00:18:39] They really did think, or could convincingly claim to think, that it was a prank. After all, they had done it before, many times, with no consequences.
[00:18:52] After the attack, both women went quickly to wash their hands, as they had been instructed.
[00:18:59] Then they went about their day. Doan Thi Huong later went back to look for the rest of the film crew, and, finding no one, headed home. She was arrested at the airport two days later.
[00:19:14] The men who had recruited them, the North Korean handlers, had slipped through passport control and boarded flights out of Malaysia within hours of the attack, long before police even knew what they were dealing with.
[00:19:30] They were back in Pyongyang by the time the newspapers reported that Kim Jong-nam was dead.
[00:19:37] And what followed was a serious diplomatic crisis.
[00:19:42] The North Korean ambassador to Malaysia called a press conference and accused Malaysian authorities of conspiring with "hostile forces" to falsely implicate North Korea in the killing.
[00:19:57] He demanded that the body be handed over to the North Korean embassy immediately.
[00:20:03] Malaysia refused.
[00:20:05] A North Korean diplomat and a staff member from Air Koryo, North Korea's state airline, were named as suspects. They took refuge inside the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur, and refused to come out.
[00:20:21] The body remained in a Kuala Lumpur hospital mortuary, and became the subject of an increasingly surreal diplomatic standoff.
[00:20:32] Malaysian authorities needed DNA to formally identify the victim; he had been travelling, remember, under the name Kim Chol.
[00:20:42] So what they needed was a DNA sample from one of Kim’s family members.
[00:20:49] Of course, his half-brother, Kim Jong-un wasn’t exactly going to volunteer himself.
[00:20:55] But eventually, DNA from Kim Jong-nam's son, who was living in Macau, confirmed the dead man’s identity.
[00:21:05] Malaysia then announced the results of a forensic examination: VX nerve agent had been found on Kim Jong-nam's face and eyes.
[00:21:17] This was extraordinary not only because of what it confirmed about how he had been killed, but because of what it implied about who had killed him.
[00:21:28] Manufacturing VX requires state resources. Only a government could have done this.
[00:21:35] The United States, Russia, and Syria had no reason to do it. North Korea, or to be precise, the supreme leader of North Korea, had a pretty serious reason.
[00:21:49] And what followed was a peculiar hostage situation, of sorts.
[00:21:54] North Korea announced that it would not allow nine Malaysian citizens currently in Pyongyang to leave North Korea until Malaysia handed over Kim Jong-nam's body and released the North Koreans sheltering in the embassy.
[00:22:10] Malaysia, in turn, declared that it would not allow the North Koreans in the embassy to leave until the Malaysian citizens were freed.
[00:22:20] After several weeks of increasingly tense negotiations, a deal was reached. The Malaysians came home. The North Koreans in the embassy were allowed to leave. Kim Jong-nam's body was eventually handed over to North Korea.
[00:22:38] The four North Korean suspects who had fled the country on the morning of the murder were never charged. They remain in North Korea to this day, beyond the reach of any international court. Malaysia and North Korea severed diplomatic relations entirely. The two countries, which had maintained unusually warm ties for decades, had no further official relationship.
[00:23:07] And as for Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong, the two young women who had delivered the poison, they were charged with murder. If they were convicted, they faced death by hanging.
[00:23:22] When their trial began, it raised some serious questions about guilt and manipulation. The defence argued, that they had been deceived.
[00:23:34] They were used. They didn’t know what they were carrying. They had not known they were killing anyone. They were not assassins; they were victims, tools that the North Korean state had picked up and used and then discarded.
[00:23:50] The prosecution argued that it did not matter whether they knew. They had carried out the act. They were responsible.
[00:24:01] A couple of years afterwards, and having been awaiting trial since the day of the murder, all charges were dropped, and the women were released.
[00:24:11] No one has ever been convicted of the murder of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:24:17] Now, there is one more layer to this story.
[00:24:21] Among Kim Jong-nam's possessions when he died was something that tells you a great deal about the life he had been living, and the threat he'd been living under.
[00:24:33] In his backpack, alongside the 120,000 dollars in cash, there were twelve vials of something called atropine.
[00:24:43] Atropine is the antidote to VX nerve agent.
[00:24:49] Kim Jong-nam had, in other words, been carrying the specific antidote to the specific weapon that was used to kill him. He knew he was a target. He knew what would most probably be used to kill him. He had the means to survive it, if only he'd been able to use it in time.
[00:25:12] But the attack was so fast, and so expertly executed, that he never had the chance.
[00:25:20] So, to wrap up, what do we make of all this?
[00:25:25] The assassination of Kim Jong-nam was not a crime of passion, or brotherly rivalry. It was a meticulously planned state operation, years in the making, carried out with a weapon of mass destruction, and designed so that the only people who ever faced any consequences were two young women who didn't know what they were doing.
[00:25:50] The four men who actually planned and executed it went home to Pyongyang. No court has ever heard the full story of what happened that morning.
[00:26:02] And what it tells us about Kim Jong-un is simple, if chilling. He has eliminated his uncle, his half-brother, and countless others who posed even a theoretical threat to his rule. The message is clear: there is no such thing as a safe distance from Kim Jong-un, and there is no such thing as a safe member of his family.
[00:26:30] Kim Jong-nam, so it seems, knew this. He carried the antidote. He just never got the chance to use it.
[00:26:41] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the assassination of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:26:46] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:26:50] As a reminder, this is part two of our three-part mini-series on stories from North Korea. In part one, we talked about Otto Warmbier. And in part three, coming up next, we'll be talking about a very different kind of North Korean story: Kim Jong-il's extraordinary obsession with cinema, and the filmmaker and actress he kidnapped to make movies for him.
[00:27:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:27:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are continuing our three-part mini-series on stories from North Korea.
[00:00:30] In part one, we talked about Otto Warmbier, the American student who travelled to North Korea as a tourist and returned home in a coma.
[00:00:41] In part three, we’ll be talking about Kim Jong-il’s unusual passion for cinema.
[00:00:47] But in today's episode, part two, we are going to talk about one of the most extraordinary and brazen political assassinations of the twenty-first century: the murder of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korea's Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un.
[00:01:06] It's a story involving a weapon of mass destruction, a fake reality TV show, two young women who had no idea they were committing a crime, and a plan almost certainly approved by the murdered man’s brother himself.
[00:01:23] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:29] Very few people expect to be murdered.
[00:01:32] Even fewer people expect to be murdered in public.
[00:01:37] And, I would imagine at least, even fewer people expect to be murdered in public by two young women they’ve never met before.
[00:01:47] But not everyone is the older brother of the leader of North Korea.
[00:01:53] Still, from what we know about the events of the morning of the 13th of February, 2017, Kim Jong-nam expected it to be a day like any other.
[00:02:08] He had arrived alone at terminal 2 of Kuala Lumpur International Airport. It was busy, as usual. Noisy, slightly chaotic, full of people dragging wheelie suitcases and staring at departure boards.
[00:02:26] The 45-year-old Kim looked perfectly ordinary: short, shaved hair, slightly overweight, a light grey suit, a small, dark rucksack over his shoulder.
[00:02:39] He makes his way towards the self check-in kiosks. In a few hours he will be on the plane to Macau, in south-east China, where he has been living quietly for several years.
[00:02:53] His name, on his diplomatic passport at least, is Kim Chol.
[00:02:58] But of course this is not his real name.
[00:03:03] His real name is Kim Jong-nam. He is forty-five years old. He is the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and the half-brother of its current leader, Kim Jong-un.
[00:03:18] And in a matter of minutes, Kim Jong-nam will be dead.
[00:03:25] At approximately nine o'clock in the morning, a young woman approaches him from behind.
[00:03:32] Before he has the chance to react, she wipes something on his face with her bare hand.
[00:03:39] She then turns around and walks away quickly. Moments later, a second woman approaches and does the same thing, pressing her palm against his eyes and his cheeks. She too disappears quickly into the crowd.
[00:03:58] The whole thing takes seconds. Nobody around them appears to notice anything unusual.
[00:04:06] After all, it wasn’t particularly violent. Weird and unexpected, yes, but nobody was shot or stabbed; it was like it was all some elaborate prank, a joke for a hidden camera show.
[00:04:24] But it quickly becomes clear that this is no joke.
[00:04:29] Kim Jong-nam feels it immediately. He walks to a nearby airport information desk and tells the staff that someone has sprayed something in his face, that his eyes are burning, and that he is feeling deeply unwell.
[00:04:46] There’s CCTV footage of this entire thing; you can see him gesturing to the airport staff. “Help! I need a doctor”.
[00:04:56] He is taken to the airport clinic. Within minutes, he is deteriorating rapidly. He goes into convulsions. He can barely breathe. An ambulance is called, but by the time it arrives, it is already too late.
[00:05:13] He dies on the way to hospital.
[00:05:16] The time from the attack to his death is less than twenty minutes.
[00:05:23] Now, to understand why Kim Jong-nam was murdered, and why his brother almost certainly ordered it, we need to go back to the beginning. To the strange and privileged and ultimately cursed life of the man who was born to rule North Korea, but whose fate was to be murdered in a Malaysian airport.
[00:05:46] Kim Jong-nam was born on the 10th of May, 1971, the oldest son of the then leader-to-be, Kim Jong-il.
[00:05:57] Now, as a quick reminder of some North Korean history, North Korea has been run by the same family since its founding in 1948.
[00:06:08] Kim Il-sung was the first leader, ruling until his death in 1994, when power passed to his son, Kim Jong-il, who we'll be hearing more about in the next episode.
[00:06:21] And when Kim Jong-il died, in 2011, power should have gone to his oldest son, Kim Jong-nam.
[00:06:31] But it didn’t.
[00:06:33] Now, we’ll get to why in a moment, but first, to the early life of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:06:41] His mother was a woman named Song Hye-rim, who was a glamorous and well-known actress. She was also married to another man, and was reportedly forced to divorce him before becoming Kim Jong-il’s mistress.
[00:06:57] And importantly, the pair never married, and Kim kept their relationship, and the existence of their son, secret from his father for many years.
[00:07:09] Clearly, this led to a slightly odd early existence for the young Kim Jong-nam.
[00:07:16] He did not go to school. He was educated at home by his aunt, and his only childhood playmate, for several years, was his cousin.
[00:07:28] As he grew older, however, his father started to acknowledge him and began to invest in his future.
[00:07:36] Kim was sent abroad for school, to Geneva, in Switzerland.
[00:07:41] He returned to Pyongyang in 1988 and was given government roles, eventually becoming head of North Korea's Computer Committee.
[00:07:51] He was being groomed, so it seemed, to be the next in line.
[00:07:57] He was also regarded, by the standards of the Kim family at least, as something of a reformer.
[00:08:04] He was cosmopolitan, worldly, interested in technology and the outside world.
[00:08:12] But he would also be described as sensitive, hot-tempered, and he had a weakness for a few things that weren’t exactly legal in North Korea.
[00:08:23] He was known to enjoy the casinos of Macau and the freedoms that came with living outside the hermit kingdom.
[00:08:31] He was, to use his own choice of words, a "totally capitalist kid."
[00:08:38] Unfortunately, it would be capitalism that would bring him down. Specifically, the allure of Mickey Mouse and large flasks of Coca Cola.
[00:08:49] In May 2001, he tried to go to Japan.
[00:08:55] He managed to get to Tokyo airport, but Japanese officials smelled something fishy about his passport. It was, supposedly, a Dominican Republic passport with the name “Pang xiong”, which translates, somewhat unfortunately, as "Fat Bear" in Chinese.
[00:09:17] When his true identity was revealed, and he was asked why he was trying to enter Japan on a fake passport, he famously told the officials that he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.
[00:09:31] This was hugely embarrassing to North Korea, and to his father. The son of the North Korean leader, the heir apparent to one of the last officially communist regimes on Earth, had been caught red-handed travelling on a forged passport to go to a theme park. To Disneyland, nonetheless, the Mecca of American capitalism.
[00:09:58] His father was said to be furious. All public engagements for this young Disneyland-lover were cancelled.
[00:10:08] And that, essentially, was the end of Kim Jong-nam's political career.
[00:10:15] He moved into a kind of comfortable but permanent exile, drifting around China, but based mainly in the gambling centre of Macau.
[00:10:25] His younger half-brother, Kim Jong-un, became the heir apparent.
[00:10:31] And when Kim Jong-il died in December 2011, it was Kim Jong-un who took power, not Kim Jong-nam.
[00:10:41] Now, if you have brothers or sisters, you know that the relationship can sometimes be intense. And, you might think, this relationship would only be further intensified if you think that one of you will become the supreme leader of the world's most reclusive dictatorship.
[00:11:02] But the funny thing is that Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-nam had no relationship; they never actually met. They were kept completely separate as children, so it’s not like Kim Jong-un held some huge grudge against his brother for something he did when they were teenagers, and finally decided to get his revenge.
[00:11:26] It wasn’t revenge, as far as we know it. This 2017 airport murder was purely business.
[00:11:36] For the relatively new Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, his older half-brother was a problem.
[00:11:43] He wasn’t an immediate, operational problem. Kim Jong-nam had no obvious power base in Pyongyang, no army, no political faction he could call his own. He wasn’t particularly charismatic, and didn’t seem to have any grand designs on overthrowing his brother.
[00:12:04] But he was still alive.
[00:12:06] He was still the eldest son of Kim Jong-il.
[00:12:10] And that made him, in theory, a potential rallying point for anyone who might want an alternative.
[00:12:19] There were whispers that China was quietly keeping Kim Jong-nam as what one analyst called "a spare", a sort of insurance policy in case Kim Jong-un ever needed to be replaced.
[00:12:34] That was not a comfortable thought for Kim Jong-un.
[00:12:38] And he had already shown, more than once, that he was willing to eliminate those he perceived as rivals. His uncle and former mentor, a man named Jang Song-thaek, had been executed in 2013. The message to any potential rival was clear.
[00:13:00] And there had, in fact, been multiple assassination attempts on Kim Jong-nam over the years.
[00:13:08] One reported attempt in Budapest in 2006. Another in 2012. Kim Jong-nam was well-aware of the threat. He had written to his half-brother in 2012, according to South Korean reports, begging for his life.
[00:13:27] He knew he was not safe.
[00:13:31] So, perhaps, he was one of those few people who does wake up and think there is a not insignificant chance that this day might be his last.
[00:13:42] And in fact, there is some evidence to suggest that he wasn’t merely a portly North Korean gambler; there is credible evidence that Kim Jong-nam had been working as an informant for the CIA. He had been meeting with American intelligence agents, usually in Singapore and Malaysia. Security footage from his final trip reportedly showed him in a hotel lift with a man identified as an American intelligence agent.
[00:14:18] And his backpack, which was found after the attack, contained some 120,000 dollars in cash.
[00:14:28] Whether his potential CIA connections had anything to do with the timing of the assassination, we cannot say. But what we do know is that North Korean intelligence had been tracking his movements, and on that Monday morning in February, their plan was ready.
[00:14:47] So, to the murder itself.
[00:14:51] The weapon used to kill Kim Jong-nam was something called “VX nerve agent”.
[00:14:59] It is classified by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction, and is the most toxic of all known chemical warfare agents. It looks and feels a little like motor oil: it’s sort of oily, colourless, odourless, and tasteless. It looks harmless enough, but as little as a single drop on the skin can be lethal.
[00:15:27] It attacks your nervous system, and kills within minutes. 15 minutes, in the case of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:15:37] And, just in case you were worried that you might get your cake measurements wrong and accidentally concoct a bit of VX nerve agent at home, no, it’s something that requires incredibly sophisticated equipment and expertise to make. Only a handful of countries in the world are believed to have the capability to produce it: the United States, Russia, Syria, and, of course, North Korea.
[00:16:05] Now, another perhaps unbelievable part of this story is that the two women that administered this nerve agent, the two young women who killed Kim Jong-nam, they weren’t highly trained North Korean agents.
[00:16:21] The younger one was called Siti Aisyah. She was a twenty-five year old Indonesian. And the other was a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman called Doan Thi Huong.
[00:16:36] Their story, which emerged after their arrest in the days following the murder, went like this: they had each been approached separately, in the weeks beforehand, by men they understood to be scouts for a Japanese entertainment company.
[00:16:55] They were offered money, around a hundred dollars each, to take part in a prank “hidden camera” TV show. The premise was simple: they would approach strangers in public places and wipe a harmless liquid on their faces.
[00:17:13] Hidden cameras would capture the reaction. It was all for entertainment.
[00:17:19] They had each done the prank multiple times, in shopping malls and at the airport itself, with different targets, using what they were told was baby oil or a similar harmless substance.
[00:17:34] They were filmed. The footage was shown back to them. It was a bit of harmless fun.
[00:17:40] Everything seemed above board.
[00:17:44] On the morning of the 13th of February, they were each given a liquid to apply to their hands. They were told who they should approach: that portly looking fellow with the black rucksack.
[00:17:59] They approached their target separately, each carrying what was, in effect, one component of a binary chemical weapon. The VX was only created at the moment of contact, when the two substances combined on Kim Jong-nam's face.
[00:18:20] This design was deliberate and ingenious. It meant the women themselves were not exposed to a lethal dose of VX, because neither of them was carrying the fully formed agent.
[00:18:34] It also gave them genuine, believable ignorance.
[00:18:39] They really did think, or could convincingly claim to think, that it was a prank. After all, they had done it before, many times, with no consequences.
[00:18:52] After the attack, both women went quickly to wash their hands, as they had been instructed.
[00:18:59] Then they went about their day. Doan Thi Huong later went back to look for the rest of the film crew, and, finding no one, headed home. She was arrested at the airport two days later.
[00:19:14] The men who had recruited them, the North Korean handlers, had slipped through passport control and boarded flights out of Malaysia within hours of the attack, long before police even knew what they were dealing with.
[00:19:30] They were back in Pyongyang by the time the newspapers reported that Kim Jong-nam was dead.
[00:19:37] And what followed was a serious diplomatic crisis.
[00:19:42] The North Korean ambassador to Malaysia called a press conference and accused Malaysian authorities of conspiring with "hostile forces" to falsely implicate North Korea in the killing.
[00:19:57] He demanded that the body be handed over to the North Korean embassy immediately.
[00:20:03] Malaysia refused.
[00:20:05] A North Korean diplomat and a staff member from Air Koryo, North Korea's state airline, were named as suspects. They took refuge inside the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur, and refused to come out.
[00:20:21] The body remained in a Kuala Lumpur hospital mortuary, and became the subject of an increasingly surreal diplomatic standoff.
[00:20:32] Malaysian authorities needed DNA to formally identify the victim; he had been travelling, remember, under the name Kim Chol.
[00:20:42] So what they needed was a DNA sample from one of Kim’s family members.
[00:20:49] Of course, his half-brother, Kim Jong-un wasn’t exactly going to volunteer himself.
[00:20:55] But eventually, DNA from Kim Jong-nam's son, who was living in Macau, confirmed the dead man’s identity.
[00:21:05] Malaysia then announced the results of a forensic examination: VX nerve agent had been found on Kim Jong-nam's face and eyes.
[00:21:17] This was extraordinary not only because of what it confirmed about how he had been killed, but because of what it implied about who had killed him.
[00:21:28] Manufacturing VX requires state resources. Only a government could have done this.
[00:21:35] The United States, Russia, and Syria had no reason to do it. North Korea, or to be precise, the supreme leader of North Korea, had a pretty serious reason.
[00:21:49] And what followed was a peculiar hostage situation, of sorts.
[00:21:54] North Korea announced that it would not allow nine Malaysian citizens currently in Pyongyang to leave North Korea until Malaysia handed over Kim Jong-nam's body and released the North Koreans sheltering in the embassy.
[00:22:10] Malaysia, in turn, declared that it would not allow the North Koreans in the embassy to leave until the Malaysian citizens were freed.
[00:22:20] After several weeks of increasingly tense negotiations, a deal was reached. The Malaysians came home. The North Koreans in the embassy were allowed to leave. Kim Jong-nam's body was eventually handed over to North Korea.
[00:22:38] The four North Korean suspects who had fled the country on the morning of the murder were never charged. They remain in North Korea to this day, beyond the reach of any international court. Malaysia and North Korea severed diplomatic relations entirely. The two countries, which had maintained unusually warm ties for decades, had no further official relationship.
[00:23:07] And as for Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong, the two young women who had delivered the poison, they were charged with murder. If they were convicted, they faced death by hanging.
[00:23:22] When their trial began, it raised some serious questions about guilt and manipulation. The defence argued, that they had been deceived.
[00:23:34] They were used. They didn’t know what they were carrying. They had not known they were killing anyone. They were not assassins; they were victims, tools that the North Korean state had picked up and used and then discarded.
[00:23:50] The prosecution argued that it did not matter whether they knew. They had carried out the act. They were responsible.
[00:24:01] A couple of years afterwards, and having been awaiting trial since the day of the murder, all charges were dropped, and the women were released.
[00:24:11] No one has ever been convicted of the murder of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:24:17] Now, there is one more layer to this story.
[00:24:21] Among Kim Jong-nam's possessions when he died was something that tells you a great deal about the life he had been living, and the threat he'd been living under.
[00:24:33] In his backpack, alongside the 120,000 dollars in cash, there were twelve vials of something called atropine.
[00:24:43] Atropine is the antidote to VX nerve agent.
[00:24:49] Kim Jong-nam had, in other words, been carrying the specific antidote to the specific weapon that was used to kill him. He knew he was a target. He knew what would most probably be used to kill him. He had the means to survive it, if only he'd been able to use it in time.
[00:25:12] But the attack was so fast, and so expertly executed, that he never had the chance.
[00:25:20] So, to wrap up, what do we make of all this?
[00:25:25] The assassination of Kim Jong-nam was not a crime of passion, or brotherly rivalry. It was a meticulously planned state operation, years in the making, carried out with a weapon of mass destruction, and designed so that the only people who ever faced any consequences were two young women who didn't know what they were doing.
[00:25:50] The four men who actually planned and executed it went home to Pyongyang. No court has ever heard the full story of what happened that morning.
[00:26:02] And what it tells us about Kim Jong-un is simple, if chilling. He has eliminated his uncle, his half-brother, and countless others who posed even a theoretical threat to his rule. The message is clear: there is no such thing as a safe distance from Kim Jong-un, and there is no such thing as a safe member of his family.
[00:26:30] Kim Jong-nam, so it seems, knew this. He carried the antidote. He just never got the chance to use it.
[00:26:41] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the assassination of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:26:46] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:26:50] As a reminder, this is part two of our three-part mini-series on stories from North Korea. In part one, we talked about Otto Warmbier. And in part three, coming up next, we'll be talking about a very different kind of North Korean story: Kim Jong-il's extraordinary obsession with cinema, and the filmmaker and actress he kidnapped to make movies for him.
[00:27:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:27:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are continuing our three-part mini-series on stories from North Korea.
[00:00:30] In part one, we talked about Otto Warmbier, the American student who travelled to North Korea as a tourist and returned home in a coma.
[00:00:41] In part three, we’ll be talking about Kim Jong-il’s unusual passion for cinema.
[00:00:47] But in today's episode, part two, we are going to talk about one of the most extraordinary and brazen political assassinations of the twenty-first century: the murder of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korea's Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un.
[00:01:06] It's a story involving a weapon of mass destruction, a fake reality TV show, two young women who had no idea they were committing a crime, and a plan almost certainly approved by the murdered man’s brother himself.
[00:01:23] So, let's not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:29] Very few people expect to be murdered.
[00:01:32] Even fewer people expect to be murdered in public.
[00:01:37] And, I would imagine at least, even fewer people expect to be murdered in public by two young women they’ve never met before.
[00:01:47] But not everyone is the older brother of the leader of North Korea.
[00:01:53] Still, from what we know about the events of the morning of the 13th of February, 2017, Kim Jong-nam expected it to be a day like any other.
[00:02:08] He had arrived alone at terminal 2 of Kuala Lumpur International Airport. It was busy, as usual. Noisy, slightly chaotic, full of people dragging wheelie suitcases and staring at departure boards.
[00:02:26] The 45-year-old Kim looked perfectly ordinary: short, shaved hair, slightly overweight, a light grey suit, a small, dark rucksack over his shoulder.
[00:02:39] He makes his way towards the self check-in kiosks. In a few hours he will be on the plane to Macau, in south-east China, where he has been living quietly for several years.
[00:02:53] His name, on his diplomatic passport at least, is Kim Chol.
[00:02:58] But of course this is not his real name.
[00:03:03] His real name is Kim Jong-nam. He is forty-five years old. He is the eldest son of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and the half-brother of its current leader, Kim Jong-un.
[00:03:18] And in a matter of minutes, Kim Jong-nam will be dead.
[00:03:25] At approximately nine o'clock in the morning, a young woman approaches him from behind.
[00:03:32] Before he has the chance to react, she wipes something on his face with her bare hand.
[00:03:39] She then turns around and walks away quickly. Moments later, a second woman approaches and does the same thing, pressing her palm against his eyes and his cheeks. She too disappears quickly into the crowd.
[00:03:58] The whole thing takes seconds. Nobody around them appears to notice anything unusual.
[00:04:06] After all, it wasn’t particularly violent. Weird and unexpected, yes, but nobody was shot or stabbed; it was like it was all some elaborate prank, a joke for a hidden camera show.
[00:04:24] But it quickly becomes clear that this is no joke.
[00:04:29] Kim Jong-nam feels it immediately. He walks to a nearby airport information desk and tells the staff that someone has sprayed something in his face, that his eyes are burning, and that he is feeling deeply unwell.
[00:04:46] There’s CCTV footage of this entire thing; you can see him gesturing to the airport staff. “Help! I need a doctor”.
[00:04:56] He is taken to the airport clinic. Within minutes, he is deteriorating rapidly. He goes into convulsions. He can barely breathe. An ambulance is called, but by the time it arrives, it is already too late.
[00:05:13] He dies on the way to hospital.
[00:05:16] The time from the attack to his death is less than twenty minutes.
[00:05:23] Now, to understand why Kim Jong-nam was murdered, and why his brother almost certainly ordered it, we need to go back to the beginning. To the strange and privileged and ultimately cursed life of the man who was born to rule North Korea, but whose fate was to be murdered in a Malaysian airport.
[00:05:46] Kim Jong-nam was born on the 10th of May, 1971, the oldest son of the then leader-to-be, Kim Jong-il.
[00:05:57] Now, as a quick reminder of some North Korean history, North Korea has been run by the same family since its founding in 1948.
[00:06:08] Kim Il-sung was the first leader, ruling until his death in 1994, when power passed to his son, Kim Jong-il, who we'll be hearing more about in the next episode.
[00:06:21] And when Kim Jong-il died, in 2011, power should have gone to his oldest son, Kim Jong-nam.
[00:06:31] But it didn’t.
[00:06:33] Now, we’ll get to why in a moment, but first, to the early life of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:06:41] His mother was a woman named Song Hye-rim, who was a glamorous and well-known actress. She was also married to another man, and was reportedly forced to divorce him before becoming Kim Jong-il’s mistress.
[00:06:57] And importantly, the pair never married, and Kim kept their relationship, and the existence of their son, secret from his father for many years.
[00:07:09] Clearly, this led to a slightly odd early existence for the young Kim Jong-nam.
[00:07:16] He did not go to school. He was educated at home by his aunt, and his only childhood playmate, for several years, was his cousin.
[00:07:28] As he grew older, however, his father started to acknowledge him and began to invest in his future.
[00:07:36] Kim was sent abroad for school, to Geneva, in Switzerland.
[00:07:41] He returned to Pyongyang in 1988 and was given government roles, eventually becoming head of North Korea's Computer Committee.
[00:07:51] He was being groomed, so it seemed, to be the next in line.
[00:07:57] He was also regarded, by the standards of the Kim family at least, as something of a reformer.
[00:08:04] He was cosmopolitan, worldly, interested in technology and the outside world.
[00:08:12] But he would also be described as sensitive, hot-tempered, and he had a weakness for a few things that weren’t exactly legal in North Korea.
[00:08:23] He was known to enjoy the casinos of Macau and the freedoms that came with living outside the hermit kingdom.
[00:08:31] He was, to use his own choice of words, a "totally capitalist kid."
[00:08:38] Unfortunately, it would be capitalism that would bring him down. Specifically, the allure of Mickey Mouse and large flasks of Coca Cola.
[00:08:49] In May 2001, he tried to go to Japan.
[00:08:55] He managed to get to Tokyo airport, but Japanese officials smelled something fishy about his passport. It was, supposedly, a Dominican Republic passport with the name “Pang xiong”, which translates, somewhat unfortunately, as "Fat Bear" in Chinese.
[00:09:17] When his true identity was revealed, and he was asked why he was trying to enter Japan on a fake passport, he famously told the officials that he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.
[00:09:31] This was hugely embarrassing to North Korea, and to his father. The son of the North Korean leader, the heir apparent to one of the last officially communist regimes on Earth, had been caught red-handed travelling on a forged passport to go to a theme park. To Disneyland, nonetheless, the Mecca of American capitalism.
[00:09:58] His father was said to be furious. All public engagements for this young Disneyland-lover were cancelled.
[00:10:08] And that, essentially, was the end of Kim Jong-nam's political career.
[00:10:15] He moved into a kind of comfortable but permanent exile, drifting around China, but based mainly in the gambling centre of Macau.
[00:10:25] His younger half-brother, Kim Jong-un, became the heir apparent.
[00:10:31] And when Kim Jong-il died in December 2011, it was Kim Jong-un who took power, not Kim Jong-nam.
[00:10:41] Now, if you have brothers or sisters, you know that the relationship can sometimes be intense. And, you might think, this relationship would only be further intensified if you think that one of you will become the supreme leader of the world's most reclusive dictatorship.
[00:11:02] But the funny thing is that Kim Jong-un and Kim Jong-nam had no relationship; they never actually met. They were kept completely separate as children, so it’s not like Kim Jong-un held some huge grudge against his brother for something he did when they were teenagers, and finally decided to get his revenge.
[00:11:26] It wasn’t revenge, as far as we know it. This 2017 airport murder was purely business.
[00:11:36] For the relatively new Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, his older half-brother was a problem.
[00:11:43] He wasn’t an immediate, operational problem. Kim Jong-nam had no obvious power base in Pyongyang, no army, no political faction he could call his own. He wasn’t particularly charismatic, and didn’t seem to have any grand designs on overthrowing his brother.
[00:12:04] But he was still alive.
[00:12:06] He was still the eldest son of Kim Jong-il.
[00:12:10] And that made him, in theory, a potential rallying point for anyone who might want an alternative.
[00:12:19] There were whispers that China was quietly keeping Kim Jong-nam as what one analyst called "a spare", a sort of insurance policy in case Kim Jong-un ever needed to be replaced.
[00:12:34] That was not a comfortable thought for Kim Jong-un.
[00:12:38] And he had already shown, more than once, that he was willing to eliminate those he perceived as rivals. His uncle and former mentor, a man named Jang Song-thaek, had been executed in 2013. The message to any potential rival was clear.
[00:13:00] And there had, in fact, been multiple assassination attempts on Kim Jong-nam over the years.
[00:13:08] One reported attempt in Budapest in 2006. Another in 2012. Kim Jong-nam was well-aware of the threat. He had written to his half-brother in 2012, according to South Korean reports, begging for his life.
[00:13:27] He knew he was not safe.
[00:13:31] So, perhaps, he was one of those few people who does wake up and think there is a not insignificant chance that this day might be his last.
[00:13:42] And in fact, there is some evidence to suggest that he wasn’t merely a portly North Korean gambler; there is credible evidence that Kim Jong-nam had been working as an informant for the CIA. He had been meeting with American intelligence agents, usually in Singapore and Malaysia. Security footage from his final trip reportedly showed him in a hotel lift with a man identified as an American intelligence agent.
[00:14:18] And his backpack, which was found after the attack, contained some 120,000 dollars in cash.
[00:14:28] Whether his potential CIA connections had anything to do with the timing of the assassination, we cannot say. But what we do know is that North Korean intelligence had been tracking his movements, and on that Monday morning in February, their plan was ready.
[00:14:47] So, to the murder itself.
[00:14:51] The weapon used to kill Kim Jong-nam was something called “VX nerve agent”.
[00:14:59] It is classified by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction, and is the most toxic of all known chemical warfare agents. It looks and feels a little like motor oil: it’s sort of oily, colourless, odourless, and tasteless. It looks harmless enough, but as little as a single drop on the skin can be lethal.
[00:15:27] It attacks your nervous system, and kills within minutes. 15 minutes, in the case of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:15:37] And, just in case you were worried that you might get your cake measurements wrong and accidentally concoct a bit of VX nerve agent at home, no, it’s something that requires incredibly sophisticated equipment and expertise to make. Only a handful of countries in the world are believed to have the capability to produce it: the United States, Russia, Syria, and, of course, North Korea.
[00:16:05] Now, another perhaps unbelievable part of this story is that the two women that administered this nerve agent, the two young women who killed Kim Jong-nam, they weren’t highly trained North Korean agents.
[00:16:21] The younger one was called Siti Aisyah. She was a twenty-five year old Indonesian. And the other was a 29-year-old Vietnamese woman called Doan Thi Huong.
[00:16:36] Their story, which emerged after their arrest in the days following the murder, went like this: they had each been approached separately, in the weeks beforehand, by men they understood to be scouts for a Japanese entertainment company.
[00:16:55] They were offered money, around a hundred dollars each, to take part in a prank “hidden camera” TV show. The premise was simple: they would approach strangers in public places and wipe a harmless liquid on their faces.
[00:17:13] Hidden cameras would capture the reaction. It was all for entertainment.
[00:17:19] They had each done the prank multiple times, in shopping malls and at the airport itself, with different targets, using what they were told was baby oil or a similar harmless substance.
[00:17:34] They were filmed. The footage was shown back to them. It was a bit of harmless fun.
[00:17:40] Everything seemed above board.
[00:17:44] On the morning of the 13th of February, they were each given a liquid to apply to their hands. They were told who they should approach: that portly looking fellow with the black rucksack.
[00:17:59] They approached their target separately, each carrying what was, in effect, one component of a binary chemical weapon. The VX was only created at the moment of contact, when the two substances combined on Kim Jong-nam's face.
[00:18:20] This design was deliberate and ingenious. It meant the women themselves were not exposed to a lethal dose of VX, because neither of them was carrying the fully formed agent.
[00:18:34] It also gave them genuine, believable ignorance.
[00:18:39] They really did think, or could convincingly claim to think, that it was a prank. After all, they had done it before, many times, with no consequences.
[00:18:52] After the attack, both women went quickly to wash their hands, as they had been instructed.
[00:18:59] Then they went about their day. Doan Thi Huong later went back to look for the rest of the film crew, and, finding no one, headed home. She was arrested at the airport two days later.
[00:19:14] The men who had recruited them, the North Korean handlers, had slipped through passport control and boarded flights out of Malaysia within hours of the attack, long before police even knew what they were dealing with.
[00:19:30] They were back in Pyongyang by the time the newspapers reported that Kim Jong-nam was dead.
[00:19:37] And what followed was a serious diplomatic crisis.
[00:19:42] The North Korean ambassador to Malaysia called a press conference and accused Malaysian authorities of conspiring with "hostile forces" to falsely implicate North Korea in the killing.
[00:19:57] He demanded that the body be handed over to the North Korean embassy immediately.
[00:20:03] Malaysia refused.
[00:20:05] A North Korean diplomat and a staff member from Air Koryo, North Korea's state airline, were named as suspects. They took refuge inside the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur, and refused to come out.
[00:20:21] The body remained in a Kuala Lumpur hospital mortuary, and became the subject of an increasingly surreal diplomatic standoff.
[00:20:32] Malaysian authorities needed DNA to formally identify the victim; he had been travelling, remember, under the name Kim Chol.
[00:20:42] So what they needed was a DNA sample from one of Kim’s family members.
[00:20:49] Of course, his half-brother, Kim Jong-un wasn’t exactly going to volunteer himself.
[00:20:55] But eventually, DNA from Kim Jong-nam's son, who was living in Macau, confirmed the dead man’s identity.
[00:21:05] Malaysia then announced the results of a forensic examination: VX nerve agent had been found on Kim Jong-nam's face and eyes.
[00:21:17] This was extraordinary not only because of what it confirmed about how he had been killed, but because of what it implied about who had killed him.
[00:21:28] Manufacturing VX requires state resources. Only a government could have done this.
[00:21:35] The United States, Russia, and Syria had no reason to do it. North Korea, or to be precise, the supreme leader of North Korea, had a pretty serious reason.
[00:21:49] And what followed was a peculiar hostage situation, of sorts.
[00:21:54] North Korea announced that it would not allow nine Malaysian citizens currently in Pyongyang to leave North Korea until Malaysia handed over Kim Jong-nam's body and released the North Koreans sheltering in the embassy.
[00:22:10] Malaysia, in turn, declared that it would not allow the North Koreans in the embassy to leave until the Malaysian citizens were freed.
[00:22:20] After several weeks of increasingly tense negotiations, a deal was reached. The Malaysians came home. The North Koreans in the embassy were allowed to leave. Kim Jong-nam's body was eventually handed over to North Korea.
[00:22:38] The four North Korean suspects who had fled the country on the morning of the murder were never charged. They remain in North Korea to this day, beyond the reach of any international court. Malaysia and North Korea severed diplomatic relations entirely. The two countries, which had maintained unusually warm ties for decades, had no further official relationship.
[00:23:07] And as for Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong, the two young women who had delivered the poison, they were charged with murder. If they were convicted, they faced death by hanging.
[00:23:22] When their trial began, it raised some serious questions about guilt and manipulation. The defence argued, that they had been deceived.
[00:23:34] They were used. They didn’t know what they were carrying. They had not known they were killing anyone. They were not assassins; they were victims, tools that the North Korean state had picked up and used and then discarded.
[00:23:50] The prosecution argued that it did not matter whether they knew. They had carried out the act. They were responsible.
[00:24:01] A couple of years afterwards, and having been awaiting trial since the day of the murder, all charges were dropped, and the women were released.
[00:24:11] No one has ever been convicted of the murder of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:24:17] Now, there is one more layer to this story.
[00:24:21] Among Kim Jong-nam's possessions when he died was something that tells you a great deal about the life he had been living, and the threat he'd been living under.
[00:24:33] In his backpack, alongside the 120,000 dollars in cash, there were twelve vials of something called atropine.
[00:24:43] Atropine is the antidote to VX nerve agent.
[00:24:49] Kim Jong-nam had, in other words, been carrying the specific antidote to the specific weapon that was used to kill him. He knew he was a target. He knew what would most probably be used to kill him. He had the means to survive it, if only he'd been able to use it in time.
[00:25:12] But the attack was so fast, and so expertly executed, that he never had the chance.
[00:25:20] So, to wrap up, what do we make of all this?
[00:25:25] The assassination of Kim Jong-nam was not a crime of passion, or brotherly rivalry. It was a meticulously planned state operation, years in the making, carried out with a weapon of mass destruction, and designed so that the only people who ever faced any consequences were two young women who didn't know what they were doing.
[00:25:50] The four men who actually planned and executed it went home to Pyongyang. No court has ever heard the full story of what happened that morning.
[00:26:02] And what it tells us about Kim Jong-un is simple, if chilling. He has eliminated his uncle, his half-brother, and countless others who posed even a theoretical threat to his rule. The message is clear: there is no such thing as a safe distance from Kim Jong-un, and there is no such thing as a safe member of his family.
[00:26:30] Kim Jong-nam, so it seems, knew this. He carried the antidote. He just never got the chance to use it.
[00:26:41] OK, then, that is it for today's episode on the assassination of Kim Jong-nam.
[00:26:46] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:26:50] As a reminder, this is part two of our three-part mini-series on stories from North Korea. In part one, we talked about Otto Warmbier. And in part three, coming up next, we'll be talking about a very different kind of North Korean story: Kim Jong-il's extraordinary obsession with cinema, and the filmmaker and actress he kidnapped to make movies for him.
[00:27:15] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:27:20] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
