In February 2017, at Kuala Lumpur airport, two young women smeared the deadly chemical agent VX across the face of Kim Jong-nam, estranged half-brother of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. He died less than 20 minutes later. CCTV footage of the incident shows one of them wearing a white top emblazoned with the phrase LOL. According to their lawyers, the pair thought they were competing in a YouTube prank show. Perhaps wisely, Ryan White’s.
Assassins: Was the killing of Kim Jong-nam a prank gone wrong?
Film review: Ryan White tries to tease out the truth behind a bizarre political slaying
Were the young women used as political pawns as part of an international conspiracy? The director of Assassins certainly thinks so
Film Title: Assassins
Genre: Documentary
The LOL T-shirt makes it a spectacle to rival Burhan Ozbilici’s extraordinary photograph of Mevlut Mert Altintas waving his gun in the air in the moment after he fired nine bullets into Russian ambassador Andrei Karlov at an exhibition in Ankara in 2016. But the story behind the image is weirder than incongruous slogans.
Netflix might have cornered the market in true-crime documentaries over recent years, but
Assassins – out now on Dogwoof on Demand, Prime Video and more – is here to prove there are shocking real-life stories that haven t been covered by the streaming giant.
Directed by Ryan White (who previously created Netflix s
The Keepers) and based on a
Assassins examines the remarkable events surrounding the murder of Kim Jong-nam – the half-brother of North Korea s leader Kim Jong-un – in broad daylight in Malaysia s international airport in February 2017.
The two people who killed Kim Jong-nam were 28-year-old Vietnamese woman Doan Thi Huong and 25-year-old Indonesian woman Siti Aisyah. Both were seen on security footage approaching Kim Jong-nam from behind and covering his eyes with their hands, which were covered in VX, the most lethal nerve agent on Earth.
The death of Kim Jong-nam shocked the world due to the deadly chemical weapon being used in such a public place.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un is widely thought to have been behind the killing – a claim the state’s media has denied.
Kim Jong-nam was the eldest son of the nation’s former ruler, Kim Jong-il, and should have been the leader’s successor.
Kim Jong-un, who is the son of Kim Jong-il’s second wife Ko Yong-hui, usurped his brother and took over as ruler of North Korea in 2011.
His half-brother’s claim to power was marred when he was caught travelling under a fake passport to Disneyland, in Tokyo.
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