MAGAZINE
Published February 17,2017
http://magazinereaders.blogspot.com/
Malaysia will return the body of the half-brother of North Korea's
leader, the country's deputy prime minister said Thursday, as police
probing the airport assassination quizzed three suspects.
South Korea says female agents working for Pyongyang poisoned Kim Jong-Nam as he readied to board a flight on Monday.
North Korea has made no comment on the killing, but its diplomats
objected to an autopsy Malaysian investigators carried out, a senior
official said.
A woman with an Indonesian passport was taken into custody overnight
after her 26-year-old Malaysian boyfriend Muhammad Farid Bin Jalaluddin
was arrested, police statements said.
The pair were being questioned along with a 28-year-old woman with a
Vietnamese travel document detained on Wednesday by detectives trying to
get to the bottom of the murder of the estranged playboy brother of Kim
Jong-Un.
The portly 45-year-old Jong-Nam had some kind of liquid sprayed in
his face after being set upon by two women, Malaysian police have said.
He was rushed to hospital suffering from a seizure, but was dead before he got there.
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.
Officers had obtained a seven-day remand order for the first suspect,
named as Doan Thi Huong, and for 25-year-old Indonesian passport holder
Siti Aishah, Selangor state police chief Abdul Samah Mat told AFP.
Jakarta's embassy in Kuala Lumpur said they believed Aishah to be an
Indonesian citizen "based on preliminary data" and were seeking to give
her legal support. Vietnam's foreign ministry said they were cooperating
with the investigation.
Reports of defection
Kim’s body was Thursday being held at Kuala Lumpur Hospital following
an autopsy, the results of which have not yet been released.
Malaysia's deputy prime minister told reporters he believed North
Korea had put in a request to claim the body through the police and the
hospital, and that Malaysia was ready to comply.
"We will facilitate the request by any foreign government although
there are procedures to be followed. Our policy is that we have to honor
our bilateral relations with any foreign country," Ahmad Zahid Hamidi
told reporters.
The killing would not affect ties between the two nations, he added.
But police chief Abdul Samah said no request had been received and an
official at the morgue said they had no indication of who would claim
the body.
When North Korea protested the post-mortem examination, "we told them
to follow Malaysia's laws", a senior official involved with the case
told AFP.
North Korean embassy officials were seen visiting the hospital's
forensics department in a diplomatic vehicle on Wednesday afternoon and
again overnight.
If confirmed, the assassination, which analysts said could have been
ordered over reports Kim was readying to defect, would be the
highest-profile death under the watch of the North's young leader Kim
Jong-Un.
Jong-Nam was the eldest son of Kim Jong-Il, but on his father's death
in 2011 the succession went to Jong-Un, who was born to the former
leader's third wife.
The first-born had at one time been set to assume the leadership of
his isolated country, but fell out of favor after an embarrassing
attempt to get into Japan on a fake passport in 2001.
He has since lived in exile, 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.
Known as an advocate of reform in the North and believed to have ties
with Beijing's elite, Jong-Nam once told Japanese reporters that he
opposed his country's dynastic system.
Reports of purges and executions have emerged from Jong-Un's North
Korea in recent years, as the young leader tries to strengthen his grip
on power in the face of international pressure over his country's
nuclear and missile programs.
[source]
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| Kim Jong-Nam/file photo |
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