KCNA via Reuters
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered that his estranged older brother, Kim Jong Nam, be assassinated, South Korea’s spy chief told legislators in Seoul on Wednesday. The alleged order came down after the younger Kim seized power in 2011, National Intelligence Service Director Lee Byung-ho told a closed-door session, according to a Wall Street Journal report. Malaysian authorities arrested a suspect in the killing just hours earlier. “The longstanding order has been executed,” Lee Cheol-woo, who leads South Korea’s intelligence committee, told the group, according to an aide. “It reflects Kim Jong Un’s propensity for paranoia, rather than his calculated act of removing a threat to his rule.” Kim Jong Nam purportedly had sent a letter to the North Korean dictator asking for mercy for his family. According to the Journal, he wrote in the letter that his family had “nowhere to run and hide.” Two women reportedly attacked him Monday with a poison-tinged cloth in the Malaysian airport, and he died on the way to the hospital. The closed North Korean regime notoriously doesn’t confirm such reports, but the Journal article notes Seoul’s spymasters are often proven to be correct in their assessments.