Medical workers have completed an autopsy on Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korea’s leader who was reportedly poisoned this week by two female assassins as he waited for a flight in Malaysia, police said on Thursday.
It was not immediately clear if or when Malaysia would release the findings publicly. North Korea had objected to the autopsy and asked for Kim Jong-nam’s body to be returned; Malaysia went ahead with the procedure anyway as the North did not submit a formal protest, said Abdul Samah Mat, a senior Malaysian police official.
Autopsy results could shed light on a death that set off set off waves of speculation over whether North Korea dispatched a hit squad to kill a man known for his drinking, gambling and complicated family life.
The autopsy was completed late on Wednesday, hours after police arrested a suspect in the case, a woman carrying Vietnamese travel documents bearing the name Doan Thi Huong. She was picked up at the budget terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where Kim Jong-nam fell ill on Monday morning. It was not immediately clear whether the passport, bearing the name Doan Thi Huong, was genuine.
She was identified using earlier surveillance video from the airport, police said.
Stills from the video, confirmed as authentic by police, showed a woman in a skirt and long-sleeved white T-shirt with “LOL” emblazoned across the front.
Malaysia detained a second woman state news agency Bernama reported on Thursday citing the inspector general of police.
The woman arrested on Thursday was holding an Indonesian passport that identified her as 25-year-old Siti Aishah, a Malaysian police statement said.
There are two female suspects and four male, police sources told the Telegraph.
“One of the girls was told to hold a handkerchief on the face of the victim after he’d been sprayed by the other girl,” an unnamed senior police officer said. “She held it there for 10 seconds. She said she thought spraying him had been a ‘prank’.” “We have already looked through the CCTV footage, hence we managed to arrest the taxi driver who had taken the two woman who carried out the assassination,” said the senior police official, who asked not to be named.
The women are thought to be agents of a foreign country, he said, refusing to speculate if they were hired by Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, who is suspected of ordering the murder.
Kim Jong-nam, a 46-year-old playboy who had been living in exile in Macau, was estranged from his younger half-brother, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and had been living abroad for years. He reportedly fell out of favor when he was caught trying to enter Japan on a false passport in 2001, saying he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.