Malaysian police probing the killing of the half-brother of North Korea's leader arrested a woman Wednesday as they tried to unravel a Cold War-style assassination the South said was carried out by Pyongyang's agents. As Seoul pointed the finger at poison-wielding female spies from North of their shared border, police in Kuala Lumpur said they were holding a woman with a Vietnamese passport.
Her arrest came around 24 hours after news broke of the death of Kim Jong-Nam, the elder sibling of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, with reports saying female assassins had sprayed toxins in his face at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. 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. Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said 28-year-old Doan Thi Huong was arrested at the airport on Wednesday morning - two days after the killing.
The suspect was "positively identified from the CCTV footage at the airport and was alone at the time of arrest," Khalid said in a statement. Meanwhile, pathologists in the Malaysian capital examined the body for clues as to how he died, in a killing that has echoes of Soviet-era spycraft.
If confirmed, the assassination, which analysts said could have been ordered over reports he was readying to defect, would be the highest-profile death on Kim Jong-Un's watch since the 2013 execution of his uncle, Jang Song-Thaek, in a country with a long record of meting out brutal deaths.
South Korea's spy chief Lee Byung-Ho said the two women struck on Monday morning as Kim was readying to board a flight to Macau where he has spent many years in exile. Malaysian police said Kim, a portly 45-year-old, was walking through the departure hall when he was attacked.