KUALA LUMPUR // A second woman was arrested in Malaysia on Thursday in connection with the assassination of the half-brother of North Korea’s leader, which Seoul said was carried out by Pyongyang agents.
A woman with an Indonesian passport was taken into custody overnight, police said. She was being quizzed along with a 28-year-old Vietnamese woman detained on Wednesday.
The two women were arrested separately by detectives trying to get to the bottom of the murder of Kim Jong-nam, the estranged playboy brother of Kim Jong-un.
South Korean intelligence chiefs say he was poisoned by North Korean agents as he walked through Kuala Lumpur International Airport on his way to board a flight for Macau.
The portly 45-year-old had some kind of liquid sprayed in his face after being set upon by two women, Malaysian police have said.
He was rushed to hospital suffering from a seizure, but was dead before he got there.
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.
Several more arrests were expected throughout the day, deputy inspector-general of police Tan Sri Noor Rashid Ibrahim told national Malaysian news agency Bernama.
The first suspect, named as Doan Thi Huong, had been expected to appear in court on Thursday morning, but Selangor state police chief Abdul Samah Mat said officers had obtained a seven-day remand order for her and for Indonesian passport holder Siti Aishah, aged 25.
Jong-nam’s body was being held at Kuala Lumpur hospital following an autopsy, the results of which have not yet been released.
Malaysia will return the body of Jong-nam at Pyongyang’s request, although there are “procedures to be followed”, deputy prime minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said on Thursday, confirming that Pyongyang had made the request.
“We will facilitate the request by any foreign government although there are procedures to be followed. Our policy is that we have to honour our bilateral relations with any foreign country,” he said.
When asked by a reporter if the killing would affect diplomatic ties with North Korea, Mr Ahmad said: “No. We maintain and we would like to strengthen our relationship with any foreign country that has established their embassy here.”
North Korea had objected to the post-mortem examination being carried out, a senior Malaysian official familiar with the investigation said.
“But we told them to follow Malaysia’s laws,” he said.
North Korean female assassins, armed with good looks and poison tools, are now the weapon of choice for a ruthless regime stalking its opponents, a high-profile defector said on Thursday, after the latest apparent assassination.
Hardy male agents wielding guns or knives have been ditched in favour of their female counterparts, who strike fear into the hearts of enemies, said An Chan-il, a North Korean defector and renowned critic of Pyongyang’s one-man rule.
“We are always mindful of young women accosting us for possible revenge killings,” Mr An said.
Reports of purges and executions have emerged from Jong-un’s North Korea in recent years, as the young leader tries to strengthen his grip on power in the face of international pressure over his country’s nuclear and missile programmes.
In 2012, Jong-nam sent a letter to his younger brother begging him to spare his life, a member of South Korea’s parliamentary intelligence committee said after news of the airport killing broke.
* Agence France-Presse
