The half-brother of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-nam, has been killed in an attack in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Malaysian police say he was waiting at the airport for a flight to Macau, where he lived in exile, on Monday when a woman covered his face with a cloth.
He is believed to have been poisoned, South Korea’s National Assembly Intelligence Committee Chairman Lee Cheol Woo told a press briefing on Wednesday.
Two Asian women are suspected of murdering the North Korean leader’s half brother, according to South Korea’s intelligence committee.
CCTV images of one of the suspects were released in local media following the arrest of a taxi driver who allegedly picked the two suspects up from the airport following the incident.
Malaysian authorities have detained a woman in connection with the investigation, according to local reports. The suspect, in her 20s, was detained in the low-cost terminal of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysian news agency Bernama claimed, citing a deputy inspector general of police.
Police told the Telegraph there are two female suspects and four male:
One of the girls was told to hold a handkerchief on the face of the victim after he’d been sprayed by the other girl. She held it there for 10 seconds. She said she thought spraying him had been a ‘prank’.
“One female suspect seen on CCTV was found wandering in the airport,” police said. She had apparently been ‘left behind’ by the other assailants, who were both Vietnamese and North Korean.
But conflicting reports suggest the two women suspected of killing the eldest son of late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il have been found dead.
Joohee Cho, chief of the ABC News bureau in Seoul, South Korea, said: “Malay police reportedly found bodies of the two women suspected of killing Kim Jong Nam.”
However, this claim has not been confirmed by officials.
Before his death, Kim ‘felt like someone grabbed or held his face from behind,’ according to police official Fadzil Ahmat, and subsequently died in an ambulance on the way to hospital.
The North Korean government has reportedly asked that a postmortem examination of the body does not take place, but the request has been denied by Malaysian authorities.
Kim Jong-nam’s body has since been transferred to the Kuala Lumpur Hospital where a post-mortem is set to take place today.
