SEOUL: North Korea has poured scorn on “absurd” claims that one of its people was killed in Malaysia with a highly lethal nerve agent, accusing South Korea and the US of running a smear campaign.
Malaysian police say two women used the VX agent to kill Kim Jong-nam, half-brother of the North’s leader, at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Feb 13.
CCTV footage shows the pair, an Indonesian and a Vietnamese, approaching him and apparently rubbing a cloth over his face. They appeared in court yesterday charged with murder.
South Korea says the North Korean government of Kim Jong-un ordered the killing of Jong-nam and engaged two outsiders to carry it out.
The North, in a dispatch on the official KCNA news agency, identified the victim only as Kim Chol, the name under which Jong-nam was travelling.
It was “the height of absurdity to claim that the person who applied VX, a substance fatal to the life even in case of inhalation of a tiny amount of it or its touch of skin, was left unaffected and the person to whom it was applied met a death,” KCNA cited unidentified experts as saying.
The agency said the arrested women had visited South Korea several times in the past and it was “highly possible” that Seoul allowed them to carry whatever substance was used.
It also claimed that the United States was introducing “all kinds of chemical weapons” into South Korea. — AFP
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