Malaysian police probing the killing of the half-brother of North Korea's leader today arrested a woman as they tried to unravel a Cold War-style assassination the South said was carried out by Pyongyang's agents.
As Seoul pointed the finger at poison-wielding female spies from North of their shared border, police in Kuala Lumpur said they were holding a woman with a Vietnamese passport.
Her arrest came around 24 hours after news broke of the death of Kim Jong-Nam, the elder sibling of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, with reports saying female assassins had sprayed toxins in his face at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
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CCTV images that emerged in Malaysian media, purportedly of one of the suspects, showed an Asian woman wearing a white top with the letters "LOL" emblazoned on the front.
Malaysian police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said 28-year-old Doan Thi Huong was arrested at the airport this morning -- two days after the killing.
The suspect was "positively identified from the CCTV footage at the airport and was alone at the time of arrest," Khalid said in a statement.
Meanwhile, pathologists in the Malaysian capital examined the body for clues as to how he died, in a killing that has echoes of Soviet-era spycraft.
If confirmed, the assassination, which analysts said could have been ordered over reports he was readying to defect, would be the highest-profile death on Kim Jong-Un's watch since the 2013 execution of his uncle, Jang Song-Thaek, in a country with a long record of meting out brutal deaths.
South Korea's spy chief Lee Byung-Ho said the two women struck on Monday morning as Kim was readying to board a flight to Macau where he has spent many years in exile.
Malaysian police said Kim, a portly 45-year-old, was walking through the departure hall when he was attacked.
"He told the receptionist... Someone had grabbed his face from behind and splashed some liquid on him," Selangor state's criminal investigation chief Fadzil Ahmat was reported as saying by Malaysia's The Star newspaper.
"He asked for help and was immediately sent to the airport's clinic. At this point, he was experiencing headache and was on the verge of passing out," said Fadzil.
"At the clinic, the victim experienced a mild seizure. He was put into an ambulance and was being taken to the Putrajaya Hospital when he was pronounced dead."
An autopsy at Kuala Lumpur Hospital's forensics department was completed by this evening, Selangor Police Chief Abdul Samah Mat told AFP, but said no results had yet been issued by the hospital.
No party had yet laid claim to the body, Abdul Samah said. "As for now the body will be kept at the Kuala Lumpur morgue."
Kim had at one time been set to assume the leadership of his country, but fell out of favour after an embarrassing attempt to get into Japan on a fake passport in 2001.
Kim has since lived in exile, gaining a reputation as something of a playboy with much of his time spent in the gambling enclave of Macau, where he was believed to have enjoyed some protection from Chinese security forces.
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