does the same. With these rapid, successive movements, they apply a chemical nerve agent called VX, one of the deadliest in the world. A single drop can be lethal. The women will not suffer from the toxins, perhaps because they will immediately wash their hands or because they handled compounds that became lethal only when mixed.
The video footage from the airport’s security cameras is hard to watch. Kim asks for help and is escorted to a medical clinic at the airport. His gait is noticeably stiffer, and he writhes in pain as he waits for treatment inside the clinic. As the VX seeps into his body, Kim would have been experiencing blurred vision, trouble breathing, nausea, diarrhea, respiratory failure, and convulsions, which are the immediate signs of exposure, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just moments later, he is dead. The security footage shows people in the medical clinic bending down to help Jong Nam, as onlookers peer curiously through the window. The last few images are of officials wheeling him out on a stretcher, his T-shirt puckered up, exposing his bulging stomach. The Malaysian health minister said later that his final moments were painful.
Subsequent pathology reports indicated that VX was on Kim’s face, eyes, clothing, and backpack, and in his blood and urine, doing lethal damage to his brain, lungs, liver, and spleen. One of the Malaysian doctors who conducted the autopsy testified in court that the large amount of feces in Kim’s underwear and his pupil constriction led her to conclude that the death was the result of acute VX poisoning. Images of Kim Jong Nam’s very public death ricocheted throughout the world and accusatory fingers pointed to his half-brother in Pyongyang, who was probably carrying on with mundane duties, such as touring a catfish factory, while Jong Nam lay dying among strangers. For a man who had been doted on by his father and pampered by armies of sycophants and servants, it was an ignominious end.
The whole incident seemed like a scene out of a bad movie. Of course, the airport authorities didn’t know that the dead man was once considered the next leader of North Korea. But they could see that he was carrying a passport that identified him as “Kim Chol” and $120,000 in his designer backpack. And they certainly didn’t know at the time that a chemical nerve agent had been applied or that the two women who had done it said they thought they were doing a prank for a reality show. One of the female culprits was wearing an almost mocking “LOL” sweatshirt.
The accused women, Doan Thi Huong and Siti Aisyah, both in their twenties, were terrified and shocked when they were arrested just a few days later. Huong and Aisyah, two young women from impoverished backgrounds, the former from a rural village in Vietnam and the latter from Indonesia, had pursued better lives for themselves only to descend into prostitution to make ends meet. But they had found themselves—probably inadvertently—at the center of international intrigue and facing the death penalty for their role in killing the half-brother of the world’s most reclusive dictator, while their North Korean handlers and the regime they worked for escaped any consequences. (In March 2019, Aisyah was freed after the Indonesian government lobbied intensely for her release from the Malaysian prison. Two months later, Huong was also let go after similar lobbying from Hanoi.)
In response to South Korean officials’ accusations that the incident was “an act of systematic terror ordered by Kim Jong Un,” Pyongyang angrily and vehemently denied its role. To the horde of journalists camped outside the embassy, Pyongyang’s diplomats in Kuala Lumpur proclaimed, “What others say about our diplomat are all lies and libelous slanders!” North Korea also maintained that the assassination was a conspiracy between Malaysia and South Korea, and denounced Washington and Seoul for “kicking up an anti-DPRK smear campaign,” likening it to “the story of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.” The United States and South Korea, however, concluded that the North Korean government was responsible for the murder.
It was not a secret that Kim Jong Un was not a fan of his older half-brother, once the favorite of their father. Kim almost certainly wanted to get rid of a potential rival, as he did with his uncle Jang Song Thaek. And the way he did it—in a public, painful, and humiliating way, widely disseminated through video and images to make it real