ED NK terror here?
Kim Jong-nam killing focuses on our vulnerabilities
Are we safe here? This question must resonate in the collective mind of Koreans after North Korea’s assassination of Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of its leader Kim Jong-un in Malaysia.
The latest chilling revelation has it that the female Vietnamese assassin visited Korea late last year.
Doan Thi Huong, 29, was the one who wore the white tee-shirt with LOL embroidered in silver letters on its front, when caught, after ambushing Kim from behind in the Malaysian Airport. Her attack was captured on a surveillance camera.
The killer had reportedly gone to Jeju Island on a Jeju Air flight in November and stayed with her Korean boyfriend for three days before departing for China. Her boyfriend left for France and the government concluded that he had nothing to with the assassination and her trip here was arranged to curry favor with the would-be contract killer.
Was this all there was? Or was there any chance that she came to look for a target here as well?
Considering an adroit use of smoke and mirrors exhibited by the North in this fatal cloak-and-dagger episode, anything alarming deserves another careful look.
For instance, the attack lasted less than three seconds; the poison brought a slow two-hour death to Kim so the rest of the hit team could get away and the Malaysian forensic team failed to promptly pinpoint the kind of poison used, among other details.
Making the North’s terror plausible here are three factors _ its history of assassinations, the advantages for the North’s deadly operatives and the effects from terror acts.
Ri Han-yong, a cousin of the deceased Kim, defected to the South in 1982 while studying in Switzerland and was shot to death near his residence in 1997 by two North Korean agents. His death followed his “coming-out” with his real identity to sell books after getting into financial trouble.
His mother was the sister of Song Hye-rim, Kim Jong-nam’s mother and the mistress of Kim Jong-il, who was the father of the Kim brothers.
In 2010, 13 years after his defection, Hwang Jang-yop, a top-ranking North Korean apparatchik, faced an assassination attempt that was foiled by counter-intelligence officers before the plan was executed. The two North Korean agents were caught. Hwang died the same year of illness. Won Jong-hwa, one of the assassins, who converted and was released after five years imprisonment, recently told a vernacular newspaper that she had dogged Hwang for three years as part of preparations.
Our open and free society can offer opportunities for NK’s terrorism, the same as in Malaysia. The growing community of North Korean defectors can be used by terrorists to blend in and out of any scene. Also of the foreign community of over 1.7 million, the large proportion of ethnic Koreans from China with traditional ties to the North can provide another layer to make their activities harder to detect. The effects of a Malaysia-style single hit or multiple hits here may panic the former defectors or alarm a bigger swath of the population. The importance of plugging holes in our anti-terrorism system can’t be overstated.