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Kim Jong-nam murder trial: two suspects await key Malaysia court ruling Kim Jong-nam murder: judge rules there is enough evidence for trial to proceed
(about 1 hour later)
A Malaysian judge will deliver a key ruling today in the trial of two women accused of the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korea’s leader, with their families hopeful they will be cleared. The two women accused of the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the estranged brother of the North Korean Leader, have been ordered to submit their defence to a court in Malaysia after the judge ruled there was enough evidence against them for the trial to proceed.
The court will decide whether there is sufficient evidence to support a murder charge against Siti Aisyah from Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam, who are accused of killing Kim at Kuala Lumpur airport in February last year. Siti Aisyah, from Indonesia, and Doan Thi Huong, from Vietnam, are accused of orchestrating the murder of Kim Jong-nam in Kuala Lumpur airport in February 2017, by smearing toxic nerve agent VX on his face as he waited to board a flight to Macau. He died within 20 minutes.
If the judge decides there is sufficient evidence, the trial will continue with the court hearing the women’s defence. Otherwise, the judge could acquit the women or amend the charge to something less serious than murder, which carries a mandatory death sentence in Malaysia. The defence had hoped that the hearing at Shah Alam High Court in Kuala Lumpur would see Siti and Doan acquitted of all charges, but the judge ruled that the trial should continue. The pair face a mandatory death sentence if they are found guilty of the murder.
If they are acquitted, they may not be freed right away as prosecutors could appeal as well as push forward with separate charges for overstaying their visas. Judge Azmi Ariffin accepted the prosecution's case that the women, in common intention with four individuals still at large, had caused the death of Kim. "I must therefore call upon them to enter their defence on their respective charges," he added.
The women arrived at the court in Sham Alam, outside Kuala Lumpur, under heavy police guard and wearing bullet proof vests, and were ushered past a pack of waiting journalists. He accepted that it could have been a "political assassination" but said he could not rule out that there had been a "well-planned conspiracy" between the two women and the North Korean operatives. His order will extend the trial by at least another two months.
Huong “could never be a killer as she had always been a charming, hard-working girl”, Doan Van Thanh, the Vietnamese suspect’s father, told AFP. Both women have pleaded not guilty to conspiring with the North Korean state to carry out the killing. Their lawyers argued that they were duped into thinking they were playing a prank for a reality TV show and did not know they were poisoning Kim.
The women are accused of killing Kim – the estranged relative of regime leader Kim Jong-un – by smearing toxic nerve agent VX on his face as he waited to board a flight to Macau. Over the course of the trial, which has lasted six months so far, 34 witnesses have been called to testify. The prosecution laid out a “James Bond” worthy plot by four North Korean operatives, claiming Siti and Doan had been recruited and trained as assassins to carry out the poisoning with VX. The poison is known as the “most potent of all nerve agents” and classified by the United Nations as a weapon of mass destruction.
The pair say they fell victim to an elaborate murder plot hatched by North Korean agents, and believed they were taking part in a prank for a reality TV show. The prosecution’s case rests on airport CCTV footage which showed Doan, wearing a jumper bearing the letters “LOL”, approaching Kim from behind and putting her hands over his face. She then ran off. Another figure spotted walking away from him the scene was later identified as Siti.
Describing the murder as something out of a James Bond movie, state prosecutors argue the pair were well-trained assassins who knew exactly what they were doing. However Gooi Soon Seng, defence lawyer for Siti, accused the prosecution’s investigation of being “shoddy” and based only on “circumstantial evidence”, having failed to demonstrate a motive for the murder.
The trial at the Shah Alam high court, outside Kuala Lumpur, heard that four North Koreans recruited the pair and were the masterminds, providing them with the poison on the day of the murder before flying out of the country. The defence for both women argued that they were innocent scapegoats in a state-sponsored political killing and that the real culprits were the North Korean operatives, who fled the country after the murder and have yet not been apprehended.
The women’s defence teams have argued the pair are scapegoats, with the authorities unable to catch the real killers, the North Koreans, and therefore desperate to secure some kind of conviction in the case. Both women say they had been approached by North Korean operatives in early 2017 while working as escorts, Doan in Hanoi and Siti in Kuala Lumpur. They claim they were both fed a similar story: that they had been selected to take part in a Japanese comedy Youtube show, where they would perform pranks by smearing lotion of people’s faces.
The lawyers say they are confident the pair will be acquitted of murder, insisting that prosecutors have not shown they intended to kill Kim, who was heir apparent to the North Korean leadership before he fell from grace and went on to live in exile. Siti said she was paid hundreds of dollars to carry out the prank at various malls in Kuala Lumpur as practice before she was brought to the airport on 13 February, and shown Kim as the next target for the TV show. Both Siti and Doan deny knowing who he was.
However, if one or both of the women are cleared, they will not necessarily walk free immediately. Prosecutors could seek to appeal the ruling, and the authorities could still hold them over alleged visa violations. Kim had originally been the favoured child to take over from his father, Kim Jong-il, but became estranged from the family after an incident in 2001, when he was he was arrested trying to get into Japan on a fake Dominican passport with the Mandarin alias “fat bear”, admitting later he had been trying to visit Disneyland in Tokyo.
The incident was said to have caused embarrassment to Kim Jong-il, who cut ties with his son and refused to let him back to Pyongyang. Kim Jong-nam instead settled in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau. He expressed little desire to return to North Korea, and angered his younger brother, who took leadership in 2011, by saying that the world would view Kim Jong-un’s leadership as a “joke”.
However, Kim was reported to have become increasingly fearful and paranoid in the past few years, fearing retribution from his brother. The court case revealed he had been carrying 12 doses of an atropine, an antidote to VX nerve agent, in his bag at the time of his death.
MalaysiaMalaysia
North KoreaNorth Korea
Kim Jong-unKim Jong-un
Asia PacificAsia Pacific
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