The hunted heir to a dictator who met death in exile

The absence of Kim Jong Nam — the eldest son of the family, who was bound by Korean tradition to preside over the funeral — was all the evidence outside analysts needed to see how isolated he had become from the center of power in North Korea, the world’s most secretive regime.

Never fully accepted by his family, sidelined by his powerful stepmother and haunted by fears of assassins, Kim Jong Nam lived much of his life wandering abroad, in Moscow, Geneva, Beijing, Paris and Macau, the Chinese gambling enclave.

On Monday, Kim, 45, met his end at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. According to the National Intelligence Service of South Korea, he was poisoned by two women who appeared to be carrying out an assassination order from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Kim died on his way to the hospital. Two women have been detained in connection with the killing.

It remains uncertain if Kim was traveling alone or if bodyguards were present. It was also unclear how many people were involved in the attack and whether airport cameras captured the episode.

Grainy footage released Wednesday showed a woman suspected of being one of the assassins, who appeared to be of Asian descent and wore a shirt emblazoned with “LOL” in large letters, before she fled the airport.

The Royal Malaysia Police announced late Wednesday afternoon that they had arrested a woman about 8:20 a.m. and that she had been carrying a Vietnamese passport in Terminal 2, where the attack occurred. They said she was “positively identified” from closed-circuit video and was alone at the time of her arrest.

She was identified as Doan Thin Hoang, 28, according to the inspector general of the police, Khalid Abu Bakar.

On Thursday, the Malaysian police said they had detained a second suspect, a woman with an Indonesian passport. A police official told the Bernama news agency that more arrests were expected.

The authorities also said that an autopsy on Kim had been completed.

There were no markers or police tape at Terminal 2 Wednesday to indicate that a crime had been committed. Airport workers said they had been ordered not to discuss the case.

South Korea’s acting president, Hwang Kyo-ahn, said Wednesday that his government was working with Malaysian authorities to find the assailants. But officials in Seoul quickly pointed fingers at Kim’s half brother, the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who has ordered the execution of a number of senior officials, including his own uncle, who have been deemed a potential challenge to his authority.

Ever since Kim Jong Un succeeded his father in 2011, “there has been a standing order” to assassinate his half brother, Lee Byung-ho, the director of the South’s National Intelligence Service, said during a closed-door briefing at the National Assembly, according to lawmakers who attended it.

“This is not a calculated action to remove Kim Jong Nam because he was a challenge to power per se, but rather reflected Kim Jong Un’s paranoia,” Lee was quoted as saying.

Kim Jong Un wanted his half brother killed, Lee said, and there was an assassination attempt against him in 2012. Kim Jong Nam was so afraid of assassins that he begged for his life in a letter to his half brother in 2012.

“Please withdraw the order to punish me and my family,” Kim Jong Nam was quoted as saying in the letter. “We have nowhere to hide. The only way to escape is to choose suicide.”

Lee said that Kim Jong Nam had no power base inside North Korea, where Kim Jong Un had swiftly established his monolithic rule with what the South called a reign of terror.

Kim Jong Nam had arrived in Malaysia last week, Lee said. He was in line at the airport to check in for a flight to Macau on Monday morning when he was attacked by the two women, Lee said, citing security camera footage from the airport. The women fled the airport in a taxi but were still believed to be in Malaysia, Lee said.

If North Korea’s involvement is proved, Washington could face intense pressure to put the country back on its list of nations that sponsor terrorism, said Cheong Seong-chang, an analyst at the Sejong Institute, a think tank in South Korea.

North Korea was first put on the terrorism list after the South caught a woman from the North who confessed to planting a bomb on a South Korean airliner that exploded over the Indian Ocean, near Myanmar, in 1987. The North was taken off the list in 2008, after a deal aimed at ending its nuclear program.

South Korea’s military plans to use loudspeakers along the shared Korean border to inform North Koreans of Kim Jong Nam’s killing and of their government’s brutality, a South Korean news agency, Yonhap, reported Wednesday. The Defense Ministry declined to confirm the report.

“By assassinating Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Un may have removed a thorn in the side, but it will further isolate his country,” Cheong said. “It is also expected to worsen his country’s relations with China, which has been protecting his brother.”

Kim Jong Nam’s life illuminates the hidden intrigue inside the Kim family, which has ruled North Korea for almost seven decades.

While the lives of the rest of the family remained shrouded in mystery, Kim Jong Nam, the oldest of three known sons of Kim Jong Il, has been the closest thing the isolated Stalinist state has had to an international playboy.

He was often seen with fashionably dressed women in international airports and spent much of his time in casinos in Macau, where he also kept an expensive house.

Outside analysts often saw him as a possible candidate to replace Kim Jong Un if the North Korean leadership imploded and China, traditionally an ally, sought a replacement in its client state.

Chinese experts on North Korea said they doubted that Kim Jong Nam had special security protection from Beijing.

“Chinese elites had no expectation this guy could play an important political role,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University. “If China wanted to use him as an alternative leader, China would have offered good protection, but this assassination shows he had no security protection.”

In Macau, where Kim Jong Nam was headed, he was safe just by being there, said Zhang Baohui, director of the Center for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.