One of the two women who authorities said poisoned the playboy half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was detained Wednesday in a Malaysian airport.
The purported assassin, identified as 28-year-old Doan Thin Hoang, was taken into police custody at Kuala Lumpur International Airport after she was caught on a surveillance camera affixed to a taxi stand outside the departure terminal, the New York Times reported. She was in possession of a Vietnamese travel document when she was busted.
Hoang 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.”
Grainy images surfaced online Tuesday night showing Hoang wearing a short blue skirt and a white shirt emblazoned with the acronym “LOL” — for “laughing out loud,” the Mirror UK reported.
Hoang 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 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 Monday morning.
The women — believed to be North Korean agents — unleashed the noxious fumes in Kim Jong Nam’s face as he waited for a flight to Macau, China.
Kim 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 had been “attacked with a chemical spray,” a Malaysian official told the Associated Press.
The casino-loving pudgeball — 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 Kim Jong Un was behind the hit because of his rocky relationship with Kim Jong Nam over the years.
Kim 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 Kim Jong Un to his throne.
Kim Jong Nam became a vocal opponent of his half-brother, telling the media that Kim Jong Un was too young and inexperienced to run North Korea.
The 33-year-old Kim Jong Un reportedly was infuriated — and may have been behind two botched assassinations of Kim Jong Nam in 2010 and 2011.
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