Bangkok: North Koreans had been planning the very public assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un, for months, possibly years.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Thirty-three-year-old Hong Song Hac, the first of four men accused of overseeing the final stages of the attack, arrived in Malaysia on January 31 – five days before 46-year-old Mr Kim flew into Kuala Lumpur airport.
Three other suspects, aged between 34 and 57, arrived over the next week.
Mr Kim infrequently visited Malaysia, a visa-free country for North Koreans, but it appears those plotting the assassination had learnt of his travel plans.
According to friends, Mr Kim spent his last few years highly paranoid, fearing for his safety in exile and worrying over the future of his homeland.
Malaysian police say two young Asian women had been trained and were primed for their mission by the time the North Koreans arrived, having repeatedly practised at Kuala Lumpur malls and airport how to rub their hands with toxic liquid and then rub it in the face of a victim.
Police have rejected a claim by at least one of the women that they believed they were taking part in the prank television show Just for Laughs.
How the women, one a 25-year-old Indonesian and the other a 27-year-old Vietnamese from poor families, were convinced to attack Mr Kim in the crowded low cost terminal at Kuala Lumpur airport on February 13 is a mystery in a plot that has focussed renewed attention on the bizarre behaviour of North Korea, a pariah state under global sanctions over its nuclear program.
The Vietnamese woman, Doan Thi Huong, posted selfies taken in Kuala Lumpur a few days before the attack.
"I want to sleep more by your side," she wrote above a photo showing herself with her eyes closed on February 11, two days before the attack.
Malaysia's police chief insists the women knew they were spreading deadly poison and had been told to "take precautions".
They washed their hands immediately after the attack, before leaving the airport, CCTV footage shows.
South Korea's intelligence agency calls the women "lizard's tails" – expendable assets to be cast off after an operation.
Ri Chong Chol, another North Korean suspect who has been taken into custody, had been living with his wife and two children in a middle-class suburb of Kuala Lumpur since 2013, claiming to work for a herbal medicine company, but never drawing a salary or turning up for work.
His daughter studies at a fee-paying college in Kuala Lumpur that in 2013 bestowed an honorary doctorate in economics on Kim Jong-un, Mr Kim's younger sibling, for his "untiring efforts for the education of the country and the well being of the people", according to Reuters.
Two other North Koreans are in the sights of detectives and are for questioning. One is 44-year-old Hyon Kwang Song, a second secretary at North Korea's embassy in Malaysia. The other is 37-year-old Kim Uk-il, an employee of the North Korean state-owned airline Air Koryo.
The four men who arrived in Kuala Lumpur in the days before the assassination flew to Jakarta immediately after the attack, then caught a flight to Dubai and then another to the Russian city of Vladivostok.
From there they took an Air Koryo flight to the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, police say.
Malaysian police have not directly accused North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau spy agency of being behind the attack.
"What is clear is that those involved are North Koreans," said police chief Khalid Abu Bakar.
On Thursday, North Korea blamed the death of its citizen on Malaysia and accused the Malaysian government of demonstrating an "unfriendly attitude".
North Korea's state-run KCNA news agency claimed that Malaysia initially told Pyongyang that a person bearing a diplomatic passport had died of a heart attack in Kuala Lumpur.
The agency said Malaysia then quickly changed its position and "started to complicate the matter" after reports surfaced in South Korea that the man was poisoned to death.
Earlier, North Korea's ambassador had denied it was Mr Kim who had been killed and demanded the body be immediately handed over to his embassy before any autopsy or forensic tests were carried out.
Malaysian authorities have so far not been able to establish what toxic substance was used.
The ambassador questioned how the two women suspects could still be alive after rubbing a deadly substance on their hands, as police have alleged.
However, based on the circumstantial evidence that has emerged so far, North Korea will struggle to spin the death into an international whodunit.
The country has a long history of kidnappings and killings in foreign countries and gross human rights abuses against its own people.
In October 2012, South Korean prosecutors said a North Korean man detained as a spy had admitted involvement in a plot to stage a hit-and-run accident targeting Kim Jong-nam in China in 2010.
Michael Kirby, Australia's former High Court judge who led a UN special committee into abuses in North Korea, said he was shocked by some of the testimonies he heard.
"I am a judge of 35 years experience and I've seen in that time a lot of melancholy in court cases which somewhat hardened one's heart," he said in 2013.
"But even in my own case there have been a number of testimonies that have moved me to tears."
