The Dark Truth Behind The Murder of Kim Jong-un’s Brother

The Dark Truth Behind The Murder of Kim Jong-un’s Brother The fluorescent lights hummed overhead in Kuala Lumpur International Airport's Terminal 2 on the morning of February 13, 2017. Among the crowd, a middle-aged man in glasses and a blue polo shirt approached the self-service check-in kiosks on Level 3. To fellow passengers, he looked like just another traveler catching a morning flight to Macau. His boarding pass read "Kim Chol," but his real name was Kim Jong-nam, and in less than twenty minutes, he would be dead. The estranged half-brother of North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un had been living in exile for over a decade, a ghost from the hermit kingdom's dynastic past drifting through the casinos of Macau and the shopping centers of Singapore. Born in 1971 to Kim Jong-il's mistress Song Hye-rim, Jong-nam had once been groomed as heir to the world's most isolated nation. Palace tutors had educated him in the arts of leadership, party officials had whispered about his future, and for a brief, shining moment, he had stood at the center of one of the world's most secretive power structures. But a single moment of weakness, a desire to visit Tokyo Disneyland with a forged passport in 2001, had sealed his fate as an outcast, transforming him from prince to pariah in a single stroke of bureaucratic discovery.