This World s14e03 Episode Script

Kuala Lumpur, capital of Malaysia scene of one of the most audacious assassinations in history.
When you look at the story and the details around it, you realise, actually, you just can't make it up.
The killers, two young women, who say they thought they were just part of a prank show.
She was quite excited about the whole thing, because she actually believed that this could have been her new career.
Controlled by a network of North Korean secret agents.
The victim-- the half-brother of the dictator of North Korea.
He was cautious.
He didn't want to take unnecessary risks.
Would he be talking about moving to Europe if he wasn't slightly worried? I'm sure the CIA would have tried very hard to recruit him, and they may have recruited him.
And behind the assassination, a global web of arms dealing and money-laundering, for North Korea's ruling family.
There is Kim family economy.
They are making foreign cash from these businesses.
And a paranoid dictator, bent on nuclear confrontation.
North Korea is at the last stage of perfecting its nuclear programme, so I think this crisis is heading toward a finale, if you will.
Why was Kim Jong-nam murdered in Malaysia? People that say that this was a botch job are not thinking like North Korean intelligence operatives.
They're not thinking like killers.
August 13th, 2017 I mean, basically, it's a huge terminal.
Once you're inside, it's like a maze.
There's so many types of people from all walks of life.
It's nine o'clock in the morning, and an unremarkable-looking man is checking in for an Air Asia flight to the Chinese city of Macau.
He went to one of those self check-in kiosks to get his boarding pass.
That's when he was approached by the two ladies.
They sort of flanked him from left and right.
Two women appear to bump into him.
One puts a cloth over his mouth.
Then, the women walk calmly off, and no-one else seems to notice.
The whole thing has taken less than five seconds.
I think he immediately felt the effect, probably less than a minute after he was attacked.
That's why, when you see the CCTV in front of the entrance where he first made contact with the policemen, he was rushing through something.
But, since it happened so fast, they didn't know that this is a serious matter.
But actually, the person is a normal person.
Security staff lead the man to the airport clinic.
By the time he was walking towards the clinic, he was already dragging his feet.
He was sweating profusely.
His coordination went haywire.
He had a minor seizure, and then he defecated.
He died in the ambulance.
By 11.
05, I think, he was pronounced dead.
The dead man was travelling on a North Korean diplomatic passport, with the name Kim Chol.
But, as the pictures went around the world, it soon became clear who he really was.
My friend called me and said, "Aren't you friends with the son of Kim Jong-il?" And I said, "Yeah.
" He said, "Isn't it him that got killed in Malaysia?" And I said, "What?" And then I looked on the internet, and I could see the image.
Actually, I got an SMS from a friend of mine.
"Have you seen the news?" "No.
" And the first reaction I had-- "Was it really him?" And then we saw the pictures.
It was very sad.
The dead man was Kim Jong-nam, a member of North Korea's ruling family.
His father was Kim Jong-il, the ruthless dictator who ruled the secretive police state for 17 years.
For seven decades, the Kim family has run North Korea through a bizarre personality cult.
They have created a fearsome police state, built on gross and systematic human rights abuses.
Kim Jong-nam was the product of Kim Jong-il's love affair with a famous North Korean actress.
His mother was number one film star in my generation.
His mother was a married woman with a daughter.
Every North Korean people knew his mother's name, Song Hye-rim, very popular lady.
So, Kim Jong-nam was not the son by official marriage.
The boy was brought up in luxury, like a royal prince, but his existence was kept secret.
Kim Jong-nam's childhood was very, very cloistered.
The ceilings in the house were so high, they needed to bring in scaffolding to dust the lights.
There was always the off-chance that Kim Jong-il would be dining with Kim Jong-nam, and so somebody literally goes through a sack of rice and pulls out any irregular, any broken piece of rice.
You are talking a perfect bag of rice, sent to Kim Jong-nam's house.
He was a bit like his father-- artistic, I think.
And Kim Jong-il doted on Kim Jong-nam, and when his family, his mother, aunt, etc, was planning to send him away for education in foreign country, we know that Kim Jong-il cried.
He wept, and he remonstrated, protested against their plan.
Despite the dictator's surprisingly emotional outpourings, the women held sway.
Kim Jong-nam was sent off to school in Geneva.
My earliest memories of Kim, we were, I think, around 15.
One day we entered in class, and we saw that guy who looked like an adult for us.
We didn't know at the time that he was the son of Kim Jong-il.
I think we didn't even know he was Korean.
We didn't really care at the time, but we saw him arrive with his little attache case, a black suit, his hair done just like his dad, you know.
Back then, I called him Lee.
I called him Lee.
That is what he told us his name was-- Lee.
I think that's what he showed us on his driver's licence, I'm not sure.
We loved the fact he had a fake driver's licence.
We thought it was fake, because he was obviously 15 in our class, but his licence said he was 18, and he was driving, and we loved that.
Very, very jealous at the time, as all young boys would be.
Released from his secretive existence inside North Korea, Kim Jong-nam got his first taste of life in the West.
I remember it was the beginning of, like, cameras, and he was always taking his camera to school and filming everybody.
Today, your phone has a camera, but at the time, it was something special to have your own camera.
I think he was just happy to take glimpses of life, you know, to photograph.
So maybe it was interesting for him to film us carefree.
But in 1988, that carefree life came to an end.
The 17-year-old was summoned back to North Korea.
His father revealed him to the rest of the family, and he was prepared for leadership, North Korean style.
During the 1990s, as North Korea's economy starts to sort of deteriorate, buses of security agents would arrive in a town, a factory town, overnight.
They would sit there and then they would start picking people to execute publicly.
Kim Jong-nam was involved in that, and he was involved in attending public executions of party and economic officials.
I don't think he had the ice in his veins necessary to do what it took to It's not easy to hold a country together the way they're holding a country together.
There's a certain skill set you need that he didn't have.
He was a nice boy.
He's got different ideas and he starts to become a rebellious teenager, a rebellious 20-year-old, and this does not really sit well with Kim Jong-il.
Faced with this increasingly brutal and isolated dictatorship, Kim Jong-nam wanted out.
Eventually, his father let him go, but only as far as neighbouring China.
An illustrious corpse in North Korea's game of thrones, or just accidental death? Kim Jong-un's older half-brother It looks like something straight out of the pages of a spy novel.
North Korean royalty, Kim Jong-nam, the estranged, exiled half-brother of leader Kim Jong-un Within days of Kim's murder, Malaysian police captured the two woman who carried out the attack in the airport.
Officials say one is an Indonesian, while the other was carrying a Vietnamese passport For local journalists, this was a huge international story.
There was an adrenaline rush to it.
It was quite addictive, I have to admit.
As far as the police are concerned, it was pretty clear cut.
Everything was on CCTV camera.
They had done the act, that was for sure.
But the story was about to take its first sensational twist.
One of the killers, 25-year-old Indonesian Siti Aisyah, now gave her extraordinary version of what happened.
She claimed that, six weeks earlier, she'd made a Japanese man called James.
He'd offered her the media opportunity of a lifetime-- work on a YouTube prank show.
When she met this so-called James, she was asked to watch another lady, to see how the prank was being played.
She was asked to play about three pranks, and after the pranks, she was paid a certain sum of money.
And the next day, again, she was taken to the airport, where again, they played about three pranks at the arrival area.
With James, Siti carried out dozens of filmed pranks on people she thought were unsuspecting members of the public.
He told her she was becoming a big star.
Siti posted this video on Facebook.
When we go When we The man she knew as James seemed a little camera shy.
Now, Siti was a social escort, and she was also a masseuse, and her income wasn't very high, and she didn't quite like the job that she was doing.
And when she was introduced to play these pranks, she was quite excited about the whole thing.
She even told all her friends about the pranks that she played.
Because she actually believed that that this could have been her new career.
The second woman involved in the attack was 28-year-old Doan Thi Huong.
She came from over 1,000 miles away, in Hanoi, Vietnam, where she worked in a bar, and dreamed of becoming a singer.
Just like Siti, Doan said she had been rehearsing pranks in cities around Southeast Asia.
Astonishingly, both women claim they had never met before the fatal prank in Kuala Lumpur airport.
Now, Siti did not know that Kim Jong-nam died on the day of the incident.
She only realised after the police came to her.
We told her what actually happened, that she had been charged for cases punishable with death, and then she realised how serious the matter was, and then she broke down.
I think the representatives of the two ladies are standing firm on the fact that these ladies were deceived.
On the other hand, somebody has to be held accountable for the murder.
You cannot plead ignorance in your defence.
So, let's see how it pans out.
By the late 1990s, Kim Jong-nam was living the life of an international playboy.
Based in Macau, known as the Las Vegas of China, he was thought to have several wives and at least six children.
On the whole, he was more like a tycoon, without taste for hard work of a typical tycoon.
He was a kind of playboy, typical bourgeoisie playboy mentality.
And he never lacked the money, lots of money to spend.
Lots of money, but he still seemed to be wanting more money.
One of the things Kim Jong-nam liked to do was he did like to treat his friends to the talents and favours of ladies of the night.
You know, he would say, "I'll pay $10,000 if you want to sleep with these beautiful Czech women, or these beautiful Chinese women.
" Kim Jong-nam said, "Look, I'm going to watch," from, I don't know, a keyhole or a closet or something like that.
"I'm just going to watch.
" So there was also a degree of voyeurism.
North Korea's a voyeuristic culture.
Everyone's under surveillance in North Korea.
So, how did Kim fund his exotic tastes? The answer lies in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
It was one of his favourite cities.
When he was here, Kim would often eat at this Korean restaurant.
Kim Jong-nam had never cut his ties to North Korea.
In fact, he still played a key role in his father's regime.
He was running an international business network, generating funds for the family.
Kim Jong-nam was involved in a whole host of illicit businesses that North Korea conducted.
He could have been involved in nuclear missile arms trade, he could have been involved in currency counterfeiting, he could have been involved with some drug smuggling.
So, it was unclear exactly what he did for a living, but we know that he was involved in this whole host of things, particularly that involved money and currency that would go back to North Korea.
Kim Jong-nam had been mainly involved in what's called technology acquisition, so he would buy computer software and send it back to the DPRK.
Some iPhones will have them, some laptop computers will have certain dual-use technologies, which, if you pluck it out, can be used for detonators and missiles.
This is all about the missile programme and nuclear weapons programme, and chemical weapons, but they are looking to use these things in missiles.
Whether he knew what was in those boxes or not is a different thing, but he must have realised it at some point.
By 2007, Kim was a wealthy international wheeler dealer, at the heart of North Korea's business empire.
Nearly a week after the killing, the Malaysian police announced their first big breakthrough.
As the investigation progressed, four suspects have been identified which could assist us very much in the investigation, and I can confirm today that they have left our country the very same day the incident happened.
The two foreign woman hadn't been operating alone in Kuala Lumpur airport.
Malaysian police had studied the CCTV footage from the airport.
It revealed that at least four North Korean agents were on the ground at the time of the attack.
The key figure was a man in a Grey shirt, identified as 57-year-old Ree Jay-nam.
He was known to the international intelligence community.
Ree Jay-nam is a long-time North Korean intelligence operative, somebody that's got extensive contact overseas.
Ree Jay-nam coordinates the operation from the coffee shop.
An agent outside gives the signal that the target is arriving.
Ree identifies him, then walks off.
As Kim looks at the departure board, he has no idea he is now surrounded by North Korean secret agents.
Another signal is given and the two young women separately approach their target.
As the women go in, yet another agent seems to be watching.
As Kim Jong-nam enters the clinic, another agent appears to follow him and look in on the dying man.
Before the target was confirmed dead, the North Korean agents had already made their escape.
They boarded a plane to Jakarta and flew via Dubai and Vladivostok to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
It looked like the perfect hit.
The recruitment of two foreigners was done so that they could remove their fingerprints from this assassination and essentially point the finger in another direction.
I suspect they were expecting these women, because they didn't use gloves, to die of this chemical.
But the women went to the bathroom very quickly, washed off the chemical and were able to survive.
But within days, the Malaysian police were pointing the finger firmly at North Korea.
It brought an angry response and complete denial.
It has been seven days since the incident but there is no clear evidence on the cause of the death.
And, at the moment, we cannot trust the investigation by the Malaysian police.
We have been respecting the Malaysian police and waiting with patience for their fair and accurate investigation result.
On the contrary, they pinned their suspicion on us and targeted the investigation against us.
Now, there are so many rumours spread to the public to defame the image of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The Malaysian police should bear the full responsibility for that.
Thank you.
This is my all comment.
- Thank you.
- (REPORTERS CLAMOUR) The killing in Kuala Lumpur was the latest chapter in the bloody history of the North Korean regime.
Ten years ago, when his father was alive, Kim Jong-nam was still an important figure.
But in 2008, the old dictator suffered a debilitating stroke.
He had to choose a successor from among his children.
It wasn't a strong field.
Kim Jong-il had two daughters, but they were automatically ruled out for being women.
He once reportedly complained that all his sons were idle blockheads.
His oldest son, who he'd doted on as a child, Kim Jong-nam, was now a dissolute international playboy.
How is your relationship with your brother? There was a mysterious second son.
All the world really knows about him is that he is an Eric Clapton obsessive, who pops up at concerts around the world.
It left just one last option.
There's this younger guy, he's 23, 24 years old, his name's Kim Jong-un, he starts to get the similar kind of jobs that Kim Jong-nam got.
Cos this is a family business and so, as long as you're not a chronic alcoholic, and you can sit up straight in your chair, and you're not mentally retarded, you're going to get a job.
The Kim family, they trust you, they trust family members, and so, Kim Jong-un's career kind of starts and that's the best option because it's all they know.
That's the life they know-- is the strongman dictator.
With the ageing tyrant's health failing, the youthful Kim Jong-un was anointed successor.
He now needed a crash course in dictatorship.
But this training was cut short.
In December 2011, Kim Jong-il died.
Still in his twenties, Kim Jong-un was now declared supreme leader.
Enemies at home and abroad began to circle.
In the West, many hoped the regime would reform or collapse.
In order to survive, he needed to show progress on the critical defence systems-- this would be the missile systems and the nuclear systems.
He needed to be able to show that North Korea had a viable deterrent.
North Korea has had nuclear weapons since the 1990s.
Kim Jong-un soon set about dramatically accelerating the nuclear missile programme.
So far, he has conducted more than 80 tests, developing missile systems that can deliver nuclear weapons over huge distances.
North Korea is at the last stage of perfecting its nuclear programme.
It's last deterrent that they're working on is achieving a capability of nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile to hit New York or Washington and they are getting closer to perfecting that programme, so I think this crisis is heading towards a finale, if you will.
(BAND MUSIC PLAYS) (CHEERING) The young dictator also saw enemies at home.
Within months of assuming power, he'd begun a brutal purge of senior officials anyone who might have challenged him.
Kim Jong-un did not have years or decades to build his power base within the regime.
He has only had a few years to do something that it took his father 30 years to do.
In order to survive, he had to conduct politics inside the regime and politics inside North Korea is a blood sport.
It is not something for the weak of heart.
The second most powerful man in North Korea was Kim's uncle, Jang Song-thaek For years, the country's second in command.
In December 2013, he was arrested and executed, blown to pieces with an anti-aircraft gun while his family was forced to watch on.
As Kim Jong-un's paranoid reign of terror continued, his brother, Kim Jong-nam, looked increasingly vulnerable.
As the oldest son, he was still a potential rival.
Even worse, he had gone public in his criticism of the succession.
Between 2010 and 2012, Kim Jong-nam exchanged almost 150 e-mails with Japanese journalist Yoji Gomi.
In them, Jong-nam repeatedly criticised the decision to pass power to his half brother.
He suggested that the new leader lacked experience and would end up as nothing but a puppet.
He also criticised how the country was being run.
Kim Jong-nam's experiences studying in Europe and living in China had persuaded him that North Korea should open up and introduce Chinese-style reforms.
Less than a month after Kim Jong-un came to power, Yoji Gomi published the e-mails.
It was an unforgivable public insult to North Korea's new dictator.
Kim Jong-nam was living on borrowed time.
This was on a narrow list of possibilities as to how Kim Jong-nam's life was going to turn out for him after his half brother succeeded in North Korea.
Kim Jong-un has to make decision whether he will let his half brother wandering around the world from time to time meeting foreign journalists and saying negative or words against Kim Jong-un's leadership, or he should eliminate the physical existence of Kim Jong-nam.
100% Kim Jong-un gave the order.
There is no way, I would say zero possibility, a North Korean agent can kill Kim Jong-nam, the supreme leader's half brother, without direct guidance and order and approval by Kim Jong-un himself.
Last week, at Kuala Lumpur Airport, someone chose to attack Kim Jong-nam.
Today we learned what killed him and it's even more shocking.
The half brother of North Korea's leader was assassinated using the most toxic nerve agent ever created The next bombshell from the Malaysian police took the story to a whole new level.
A press release was sent out to media outlets from the Inspector General of Police saying that his cause of death was due to something known as VX agent, which was completely new to us.
It sounded like something out of a spy novel.
The chemical that we discovered, which caused the death, is VX, which is a little weapon registered under the registered as a chemical weapon.
I recall that on Monday morning I got a call from our Director General's office.
A apparently we had received a note verbale from the Malaysian embassy here asking for the OPCW's assistance and they wanted some technical assistance.
They wanted some advice from me, some reference materials and whatnot.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons confirmed the astonishing findings about what killed Kim Jong-nam.
VX is a nerve agent.
It's actually the most powerful nerve agent that's known to date.
It's about ten times more powerful than sarin, about 300 times more powerful than mustard gas and about 5,000 times more potent than chlorine, so it's really toxic.
It takes about 10mg to kill an average adult person.
Now, 10mg is just a fraction of a drop, so it doesn't take very much.
It looks like a horrible way to die.
You basically suffocate, you convulse, you're jerking around, it's not pleasant at all.
VX was first developed by Britain's Porton Down weapons laboratory in the 1950s.
One of the most lethal weapons of mass destruction, it has never been used in warfare.
Why use a chemical VX nerve agent in a public international airport? So many things could have gone wrong.
One of the ladies could have just done it wrong with somebody else just by tripping.
So many accidental possibilities.
You needed something that would kill him, but that you would have the lag time, or the delay, in the death that would allow the North Koreans to get out of the country.
If you slit his throat, one, you can't do it in a public place.
Two, you can't use foreign agents that you have duped into thinking that this is some sort of a a game show.
And I think Kim Jong-un wanted to make a point to any would-be rivals, potential opponents, defectors out there, saying, "I can kill you in any manner.
" I think he wanted it to be public.
He wanted the whole world to know.
North Korea's nuclear weapons programme has left it isolated from the international community.
This public display of a chemical weapon as powerful as VX was another act of defiance.
VX is banned under the International Chemical Weapons Convention.
There are currently 192 member states that are signed up for the Convention, that's almost the full world.
There are four hold-outs-- Egypt, Israel, South Sudan and North Korea-- and we have sent a number of messages to North Korea asking them to accede to the convention.
Chemical weapons of mass destruction pose a direct threat to North Korea's neighbours in the region.
The South Korean capital Seoul is just 35 miles from the border.
Chemical agents, in general, used in a military context, can be loaded into bombs, mines, mortars, that type of thing.
All chemical agents could kill huge numbers of people if it's delivered effectively for their purposes.
In response, North Korea poured scorn on the idea that VX nerve agent could be used to kill the man they were still calling Kim Chol.
How is it possible two female ladies, who used their bare hands to contain the material, and applied to the face of the victim that the two ladies survived? There's no single person or passenger who got contaminated or affected.
According to the information we have Kim Chol has health problems.
He has a record of myocardial infarction disease, in other words, heart disease.
Therefore, this is a strong indication that the cause of the death is the heart attack.
(JOURNALISTS CLAMOUR) The diplomatic row between North Korea and Malaysia began to escalate and it raised some awkward questions for the Malaysian authorities.
The Kim Jong-nam assassination has really thrown up a lot of details about the broader relationship between Malaysia and North Korea.
We now know through some of these details coming out about the case, but also other investigations that have arisen at the same time, that actually North Korean activity in Malaysia was extremely widespread.
Malaysia was very important country to North Korea.
Actually, Malaysia was regarded a kind of window for North Korea to go abroad because Malaysia is a visa-free country for North Korea.
It was a kind of paradise for North Korea to expand their business.
It emerged that there had been more than a thousand North Koreans living and working in Malaysia.
The access road to Borneo Highlands, one of the toughest road projects in Malaysia, with its more than 30% gradient, completed in 1998 by MKP.
North Korea's influence in Malaysia went far beyond road building and golf courses.
This is Glocom, an arms company.
Glocom was a network selling military communications out of Malaysia, marketing arms and related material overseas, pretending to be a Malaysian arms manufacturer but indeed was, behind the scenes, North Korean, selling its technology to parts of Africa, the Middle East and potentially Southeast Asia.
Malaysia isn't the only country to play host to North Korean businesses.
Many have the view that North Korea is actually extremely, extremely isolated from the international community, that it doesn't have trade relations with the outside world, bar China, but the truth couldn't be further from that, actually.
North Korea is very sophisticated in concealing the fact that it is indeed North Korea doing business overseas.
It's good at hiding in plain sight.
North Korea has been doing this stuff since around 1974, 1975, so they have been doing this for four decades.
So this is a multibillion dollar economic activity the North Koreans are involved in.
Even in Europe you can find North Korean business activity.
North Korea's national insurance company was able to operate in the UK.
It's not believed that North Korea has strong links in the conventional sense to the United States, but we have seen that North Korea is able to access products from the United States of America.
Kim Jong-un's motorcade was armoured in the United States and then re-exported to North Korea without, seemingly, the knowledge of US customs authorities.
You need to understand that North Korea essentially has three different economies.
You have the normal national economy, you have the defence economy, and then you have the royal economy.
The royal economy is an international business network which funds the lavish lifestyle of the Kim family.
Most of the money goes through a mysterious government department called Office 39.
Well, on paper, Office 39 is just another department in the Korean Worker's Party, but, in practice, Office 39 is the ultimate slush fund.
It mixes both illicit and licit activity and creates that kind of support internally in North Korea to keep the leadership and the elite happy.
Office 39 is thought to bring in up to £1 billion a year for the Kim family.
The population of North Korea lives in desperate poverty.
A famine in the 1990s is thought to have killed up to two million people.
While ordinary North Koreans go hungry, a huge proportion of national income is diverted to the ruling clique.
Our company, insurance company, was totally out of control of the cabinet and of the finance ministry and of the central bank.
So, out of the system that is Kim family economy, they are making foreign cash from these businesses.
So we make money and withdraw 20 million US dollar cash every year for Kim Jong-il's birthday.
So we keep them, count them and put them in 20 boxes, one million each.
It was regarded as one of the best profitable organisations in North Korea, in Pyongyang, and we enjoyed benefit for that.
The people working for overseas departments and offices are required to pay 30,000 to 50,000 euros a year.
In North Korea, all the foreign currency is calculated in euros because US dollars are considered the currency of US imperialism.
But when they actually take back cash, they carry dollars, not euros.
It isn't difficult to take back $20,000 to $30,000 because it isn't bulky and it can be carried in a bag.
These are people that are highly capable of figuring out how to procure money and assets for the Kim family.
These are people that can change their location and their mode of operation, and even their identity, constantly shifting, so that authorities around the world find it very difficult to track them.
This revenue has allowed Kim Jong-un to spend an estimated £500 millions on luxury goods for himself and the ruling elite.
Since 2006, the international community has imposed economic sanctions on the regime.
Recently, even the country closest to North Korea, China, has agreed to sanctions aimed at stopping Kim's nuclear programme.
I always say that UN sanctions on North Korea are like an expanding sieve.
No single one of the sanctions measures that have been put in place against North Korea at the UN level enjoys robust, global implementation.
If China systemically implemented the sanctions at the UN that it has agreed to, that would be a huge step forward.
But actually, it's not just China that's important here.
There's so many countries around the world that have those North Korean business communities, that have those political ties still to North Korea, that aren't using the leverage that they too have.
One of the main concerns has been Malaysia.
The Malaysian authorities have been accused of, at best, turning a blind eye to North Korean business activities.
We've seen Malaysian politicians, from various parts of the system, actually involved in North Korean business taking place in Southeast Asia and the more we look, the more instances of that we seem to find.
So they're completely in the spotlight and are deeply uncomfortable with it.
Three weeks on from the death of Kim Jong-nam, pressure was building on the Malaysian government to take action against North Korea.
Finally, they expelled the North Korean ambassador.
(SHOUTING) I express grave concern over the extreme measures taken by the Malaysian government, doing great harm to the bilateral relations, which has a history of more than 40 years.
North Korea was prepared to sacrifice the friendly relations for that particular assassination-- that was that much important to North Korean regime.
The diplomatic confrontation between the two countries continued.
It emerged that three more suspects in the assassination were holed up in the North Korean embassy.
The Malaysian government was forced to let them leave the country in return for the release of nine of its own diplomats held in Pyongyang.
All the North Korean suspects had got away.
For high-ranking North Korean defectors brave enough to speak out, it felt like a betrayal.
I was very much disappointed by the outcome of the Malaysian government's decision to let free all those North Korean suspects.
In the past, North Korea was engaged in a lot of international terrorist incidents, but there was no proof, but this time it was a proof and it was shown to everyone in the world by CCTV cove rage.
But the outcome of this investigation was very disappointing.
With the North Korean agents off the hook it left only the two young women facing prosecution.
When the two women arrive, it was like Mission Impossible scene.
Of course everybody just run and scramble for picture.
And the commandos, they shout at us and ask us to stay where we are.
I've never seen such thing.
It's a moment where everybody wants to know what is the law that is being applied to them and also what is going to happen to them.
The two women have been charged with murder.
The trial is set for October.
If they're found guilty, they will face the death penalty.
The police believe they have a strong case and say they will call more than 30 witnesses.
But the lawyer for Siti Aisyah believes that there cannot be a fair trial.
This case is somewhat mysterious in many ways and also it involves a question of politics.
Now, nine Malaysians were held hostage in North Korea.
Now in exchange of those nine hostages, four suspects were allowed to go back to Korea.
Now those four suspects may be very vital to the defence and, had they been allowed Now that they have been allowed to go back, that would severely compromise the defence case.
They must allow these two girls to go.
They should not charge them.
They should reconsider the case because what they have done is you have compromised their defence and that would have caused a miscarriage of justice.
I think that they were duped into taking part in something that they may have thought may not be completely above board, but I don't think they had any idea what they were getting themselves into and unfortunately they've been left holding the bag.
Six weeks after the attack, the body was finally flown back to North Korea.
North Korea is still adamant that the dead man was not Kim Jong-nam, but a citizen called Kim Chol.
It's impossible to know how the North Korean regime will view the results of this extraordinary operation.
Of course, that was not completely successful.
They left behind so many traces of North Korean involvement and this will lead to the embarrassment both of Malaysia and North Korea, too.
The operation could have gone smoother.
I'm sure they wanted to get all the North Korea agents out and that was the plan, and that fell apart, and that went wrong.
So the operation, by no means, was perfect.
But, at the end of the day, Kim Jong-nam is dead and Kim Jong-un made a point-- that no-one is safe.
The mission was a success in the fact that they killed Kim Jong-nam.
None of the North Korean nationals implicated in this assassination has been brought for criminal charges.
People that say that this was a botched job are not thinking like North Korean intelligence operatives.
They're not thinking like killers.
North Korea recently launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that they claim could hit mainland USA.
Tensions on the Korean Peninsula are at their highest for more than 50 years.
In the midst of this crisis, the assassination of Kim Jong-nam angered both China and Malaysia.
So why did it happen? He text me a message saying, "I'll see you in Geneva.
I'll be back in three days.
" He was like coming back to Geneva to search back all his youth, like part of a time where we had nothing to think about, nothing to be afraid of.
Kim Jong-nam told his school friends that he wanted to move to Europe and become a European citizen, in other words, to defect to the West.
I think he let his guard down somewhat in Europe.
He felt more safe and more secure here, especially in Switzerland.
Was he worried? Yeah, would he be talking about moving to Europe if he wasn't slightly worried? Probably.
It's not easy to live the life he lives.
OK, maybe he had a bit of money-- we don't even know how much he had-- he was very secretive about it.
But money is not everything.
I mean, if you cannot live freely your life, then I'm sure that something breaks inside of you.
Moving to Europe would have been a final break with the regime.
As North Korea's most high-profile defector, Kim would become an intolerable threat to his half brother.
From foreign intelligence service's perspective, this is somebody that you want to get to know, so I am sure CIA would have tried very hard to recruit him and they may have recruited him.
Ultimately, I think Kim Jong-un was afraid that, should hostile powers, like United States or maybe even China, one day want to have a change in regime, that they could put Kim Jong-Nam as head of that new leadership in North Korea because, of course, Kim Jong-nam has legitimacy.
He would have been a fundamentally different leader.
I think it would have been possible for him to carry out reform and change North Korea.
Give up nuclear weapons.
North Korea's fate, for the people, for the country, would have been better certainly under Kim Jong-nam.
The present leader eliminated one possible source of threat to his throne, but I do not believe that makes his throne more stable or secure.
One of the curses of a tyrant is that you actually never feel secure in the position of power.
With the threat from his older brother removed, Kim Jong-un may now feel more secure on his throne, but the Kim family tree still has many branches.
My name is Kim Han-sol from North Korea.
Part of the Kim family.
Here's my passport.
Just three weeks after Kim Jong-nam's death, this mysterious video was posted by a previously unknown group.
It shows his oldest son.
It shows that he's safe and it shows that he's alive.
Um and that, you know, he could be a shadow darkening Kim Jong-un's doorway at some point.
We hope We hope this gets better soon, yeah.