There are no easy answers in the death of North Korea's exiled son Kim Jong Nam. The man was allegedly killed by two women, one of them an Indonesian migrant, with deadly VX nerve agent in Kuala Lumpur's international airport earlier this year. Security cameras caught the moment the two women attacked Kim, covering his face with the fast-acting poison, on video. Now we know that cameras also recorded Kim's final few moments alive… and the footage is pretty brutal.The video, which was first broadcast by Japan's Fuji Television over the weekend, shows paramedics casually wheeling Kim's body into a secured hallway. The medical staff looks surprisingly calm during the entire ordeal, casually chatting amongst each other as one paramedic squeezes oxygen into Kim's lungs. When the elevator finally arrives, the paramedics waited a full minute before closing the elevator doors as they seemed more focused on a colleague who was locked in the hallway than getting Kim to an ambulance, according to reports published on the news site Free Malaysia Today.It's a difficult scene to watch, especially when you realize that Kim had just been exposed to 1.4 times the lethal dose of VX nerve agent, according to recent court testimony.The video shown on Fuji Television continued on to another scene, this one showing a meeting between accused assassin Siti Aisyah, of Indonesia, and an unnamed North Korean agent. In that footage, the North Korean agent arrives first, fiddling with a selfie stick, before Siti walks in, smiles, and sits down. The two appear in the recording to know each other.
Watch: Siti Aisyah's Family Speaks Out as She Heads to Court Over Kim Jong Nam Killing
That security camera footage makes it harder, but still not impossible, to believe the defense's claim that Siti and her accomplice Doan Thi Huong had no idea that they were sent to the airport to kill Kim—the exiled half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Attorneys defending the two women have thrown out a number of competing theories in an attempt to cast doubt on the prosecution's timeline. The two women were tricked into fatally poisoning Kim by North Korean spies who told them it was a prank for a video series, the lawyers said. And maybe someone else poisoned Kim first, they added, asking how two women could handle such a deadly nerve agent with no protection and walk away unscathed.But the prosecution says these leaked videos are only a few of the scenes they plan to present. On Wednesday, the prosecution showed the court footage of Doan allegedly practicing the attack in the same location only days before she allegedly fatally poisoned Kim. In that video, Doan pretends to wipe a stranger's face with a cloth before seeming to apologize and back away, according to news reports.They plan to introduce additional angles of the attack that appear to show that both women knew they were handling poison at the time. But even then, the charges against Siti and Doan are difficult to prove. At least four other suspects, all of them North Korean citizens, fled Malaysia shortly after the attack, disappearing after a series of transfers took them to Indonesia and abroad. And two other suspects, a North Korean and a Malaysian, were reportedly arrested before vanishing from subsequent news reports."We have an uphill battle in this case," prosecutor Wan Shaharuddin Wan Ladin told Sky News. "We are the underdogs. They have the upper hand but we have our own strategy."The trial is expected to continue for at least two more months as the prosecution presents its evidence. Both women face the death penalty if convicted.
Advertisement
Watch: Siti Aisyah's Family Speaks Out as She Heads to Court Over Kim Jong Nam Killing
That security camera footage makes it harder, but still not impossible, to believe the defense's claim that Siti and her accomplice Doan Thi Huong had no idea that they were sent to the airport to kill Kim—the exiled half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Attorneys defending the two women have thrown out a number of competing theories in an attempt to cast doubt on the prosecution's timeline. The two women were tricked into fatally poisoning Kim by North Korean spies who told them it was a prank for a video series, the lawyers said. And maybe someone else poisoned Kim first, they added, asking how two women could handle such a deadly nerve agent with no protection and walk away unscathed.But the prosecution says these leaked videos are only a few of the scenes they plan to present. On Wednesday, the prosecution showed the court footage of Doan allegedly practicing the attack in the same location only days before she allegedly fatally poisoned Kim. In that video, Doan pretends to wipe a stranger's face with a cloth before seeming to apologize and back away, according to news reports.They plan to introduce additional angles of the attack that appear to show that both women knew they were handling poison at the time. But even then, the charges against Siti and Doan are difficult to prove. At least four other suspects, all of them North Korean citizens, fled Malaysia shortly after the attack, disappearing after a series of transfers took them to Indonesia and abroad. And two other suspects, a North Korean and a Malaysian, were reportedly arrested before vanishing from subsequent news reports."We have an uphill battle in this case," prosecutor Wan Shaharuddin Wan Ladin told Sky News. "We are the underdogs. They have the upper hand but we have our own strategy."The trial is expected to continue for at least two more months as the prosecution presents its evidence. Both women face the death penalty if convicted.