The banished playboy son of late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il — who lost his shot at becoming despot by being even nuttier than his half-brother, Kim Jong Un — was murdered by two female assassins toting poison in the middle of a Malaysian airport Monday.
The 007-worthy slaying was a fitting end for Kim Jong Nam, who had been exiled to China after committing a series of widely publicized missteps that embarrassed his dear old dictator dad.
Half-sibling Kim Jong Un would replace him as next in line to become the country’s dictator, taking over when their father died in 2011.
But if Kim Jong Un is now infamous for his wacky antics, he had nothing on his half-brother, a jovial, baby-faced pleasure-seeker with a penchant for women, gambling and newsboy caps.
Kim Jong Nam’s princely but troubled life ended Monday morning when the 45-year-old playboy was killed by two hitwomen wielding a toxic spray in the middle of bustling Kuala Lumpur International Airport.
The killers made a beeline for Jong Nam as he waited for a flight to Macau, China, and squirted a toxic plume in his face, according to media reports.
The women then dashed out of the terminal and jumped into a taxi, which sped away.
Jong Nam “felt like someone grabbed or held his face from behind,” Malaysian police official Fadzil Ahmat told Reuters. “He felt dizzy, so he asked for help at an information desk.”
He gasped to medical workers that he was “attacked with a chemical spray,” a Malaysian official told the Associated Press.
Jong Nam was first taken by ambulance to an airport clinic, but his condition quickly deteriorated. He was then rushed to nearby Putrajaya Hospital for emergency treatment and was pronounced dead on arrival.
Investigators are still searching for a motive in the attack.
“So far there are no suspects, but we have started investigations and are looking at a few possibilities to get leads,” Ahmat said.
Detectives were combing through surveillance footage at the airport for clues to “suspicious persons in the airport,” according to another police official.
Toxicology tests will be performed on Jong Nam to identify the substance that killed him.
His nutty, jealous half-brother has already been blamed for orchestrating the hit because of their fractured relationship.
It wouldn’t be the first time that Kim Jong Un has been fingered in such a plot.
In July 2010, a North Korean operative was arrested in South Korea and, under police questioning, confessed that he was ordered to try to assassinate Kim Jong Nam, according to The Telegraph.
In 2011, North Korean spies also tried to assassinate Kim Jong Nam in Macau, a source told the Daily Mail.
For many years, Jong Nam was at odds with Jong Un over their family’s oppressive rule of North Korea since the 1940s.
The half-brothers, who were born many years apart to different mothers in North Korea, apparently never got along.
The half-brothers, who were born many years apart to different mothers in North Korea, apparently never got along.
Jong Un’s mom, Ko Yong-hui, was a dancer who died of breast cancer in Paris, France, while she was receiving medical treatment in 2004.
Jong Nam’s mom, Song Hye-rim, was their dad’s mistress and a film actress who died in 2002 under mysterious circumstances in Moscow. Kim Jong Il’s conservative family didn’t approve of their relationship, so he kept it a secret for years — along with the fact that Jong Nam was his son. The boy went to live in a private mansion in central Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
Growing up, Jong Nam led a lonely life behind palace gates, save for attention from his father. Kim Jong Il nurtured his son, sharing dinners with him, sleeping in the same bed together and frequently phoning him while at work.
When he got older, Jong Nam attended Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang and served with the Korean People’s Army before he was appointed in 1998 to a senior role in the Ministry of Public Security.
He was also appointed head of North Korea’s Computer Committee, in charge of developing an information technology industry, according to the Telegraph.
Until his arrest in 2001, Jong Nam was being groomed as the heir apparent to his father’s throne. Then authorities caught Jong Nam with a fake Dominican Republic passport in Tokyo’s Narita Airport while he was reportedly on his way to the city’s Disneyland with two women and his 4-year-old son.
The name on his passport was “Pang Xiong” — “Fat Bear” in Mandarin Chinese. He was detained for three days.
On several prior occasions, Jong Nam had frequented bathhouses in Tokyo’s Yoshiwara red-light district, according to the book “Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader.”
After the embarrassing events, his furious father reportedly canceled a trip to China and banished Jong Nam from North Korea.
Jong Nam lived in exile in Macau — Asia’s center for Las Vegas-style casino gambling — and became famous for his glitzy lifestyle.
He acquired a lusty passion for high-stakes gambling and hopped from country to country with a fake Portuguese passport, the Telegraph reported.
Over the past several years, China had been financing Jong Nam’s expensive lifestyle because the country hoped to see him one day become North Korea’s supreme leader in the event Kim Jong Un died, according to the New York Times
“Kim Jong Nam is a person which China can control and the North Korean people can trust,” a relative of Jong Nam told the Times. Beijing even publicly threw its support behind Jong Nam.
During brief media interviews over the years, Jong Nam had insisted that he had zero interest in taking over for his half-brother and had no intentions of defecting.
Yet he still periodically came out of his rabbit hole to voice opposition to his father’s “hereditary transfer” of power to Jong Un.
“Personally, I am against third-generation succession,” Jong Nam reportedly told Japan’s TV Asahi in 2012. Still, “I hope my younger brother will do his best for the sake of North Koreans’ prosperous lives,” he said.
But he occasionally poked the bear. Jong Nam once told a Japanese journalist that he expected Kim Jong Un’s regime to collapse because his half-brother was too young and inexperienced.
South Korea’s governing Liberty Korea Party released a statement Tuesday saying the murder was a “naked example of Kim Jong Un’s reign of terror” — making it clear whom they blamed Jong Nam’s death on.