Police on Wednesday detained a woman they say was part of the sinister duo that poisoned the playboy half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in a Malaysian airport.
The 28-year-old alleged assassin was taken into police custody at Kuala Lumpur International Airport after she was caught on a surveillance camera affixed to a taxi stand outside a terminal, the Independent reported.
The woman was “positively identified from the CCTV footage at the airport and was alone at the time of arrest,” Malaysian police said in a statement released Wednesday. “Any further actions against suspect/suspects will be taken in accordance with the law.”
Officials have not yet released her name, but said she was who was in possessions of a Vietnamese travel document when she was busted.
Grainy images surfaced online Tuesday night, showing the middle- aged Asian woman wearing a short blue skirt and a white shirt emblazoned with the acronym “LOL” – laughing out loud, the Mirror UK reported.
She is seen standing outside the airport with her right hand resting on a purse slung across her body. The other female assassin hopped in a taxi, which drove off. She was still at large.
In a scene out of a James Bond film, the toxic spray-wielding the femme fatales targeted 45-year-old Kim Jong-nam – the globetrotting black sheep of his North Korean ruling class family — in the airport’s departure hall on Monday morning.
The women – believed to be North Korean agents – unleashed the noxious fumes in the face of Jong-nam as he waited for a flight to Macau, China.
Jong-nam “felt like someone grabbed or held his face from behind,” Malaysian police official Fadzil Ahmat told Reuters. “He felt dizzy, so he asked for help at an information desk.”
He gasped to medical workers that he was “attacked with a chemical spray,” a Malaysian official told the Associated Press.
The casino-loving pudge ball – whose late father was former North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il – was rushed to nearby Putrajaya Hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Speculation has run rampant that Jong-un was behind the hit because of his rocky relationship with Jong-nam over the years.
Jong-nam was in line to become the next totalitarian ruler of North Korea, but his star dimmed after his 2001 arrest in Tokyo for possessing a fake passport.
His father banished him from North Korea and he had lived in exile ever since.
Kim Jong-il died of natural causes in 2011, but not before he anointed Jong-un to his throne.
Jong-nam became a vocal opponent of his half-brother, telling the media that Jong-un was too young and inexperienced to run North Korea.
The 33-year-old Jong-un was reportedly infuriated – and may have been behind two botched assassinations of Jong-nam in 2010 and 2011.
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