Tag: Malaysia

Leaked Diplomatic Note Shows that China is Trying to Pressure Malaysia from Oil Exploration in the South China Sea

The Malaysian prime minister says his country is not going to give in to Chinese demands to stop drilling for oil in the South China Sea:

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said Thursday that Malaysia will not bow to demands by China to stop its oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea as the activities are within the country’s waters. Anwar said Malaysia would continue to explain its stance following China’s accusations in a protest note in February to the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing that Kuala Lumpur had infringed on its territory.

Malaysia’s Foreign Ministry said Wednesday it was investigating the leak of the diplomatic protest note that was published by a Filipino media outlet on Aug. 29. “We have never intended in any way to be intentionally provocative, unnecessarily hostile. China is a great friend, but of course we have to operate in our waters and secure economic advantage, including drilling for oil in our territory,” Anwar said in a televised news conference from Russia, where he is on an official visit.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer published the diplomatic note in which Beijing reportedly demanded that Malaysia immediately halt all activities in an oil-rich maritime area off Sarawak state on Borneo island. The report said China had accused Malaysia of encroaching on areas covered by its 10-dash line, Beijing’s controversial map showing its claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea. The diplomatic note also expressed Beijing’s displeasure over Malaysia’s oil and gas exploration activities near the Luconia Shoals, which is near to Sarawak, it said.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link.

North Korea Cuts Diplomatic Relations with Malaysia

The Malaysian courts just did a real solid for the U.S. and the Kim regime is not happy:

North Korea said Friday it will cut off diplomatic relations with Malaysia for extraditing one of its nationals to the United States to face money laundering charges and pinned Washington as the “backstage manipulator.”

Mun Chol-myong, a North Korean businessmen living in Malaysia, was accused of supplying prohibited luxury items from Singapore to Pyongyang and laundering funds through shell companies in violation of U.N. sanctions. Last week, Malaysia’s top court ruled that he can be extradited to Washington, rejecting his appeal challenging the extradition request from the U.S.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but I think the Malaysian authorities have always maintained animosity at the Kim regime in the wake of using a nerve agent to kill Kim Jong-nam in the Kuala Lumpur airport. They are probably glad to be done with the North Koreans in their country.

Malaysian Prime Minister Wants to Restart Normal Relations with North Korea

I guess the Malaysians are not very considered about a state actor using biological weapons inside their international airport:

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad speaks during an interview with Yonhap News Agency at his hotel in Busan on Nov. 25, 2019. (Yonhap)

He stressed that Malaysia is “very suitable for interacting with Korea,” given his country’s English-speaking human resources and stable politics.

Reflecting Malaysia’s diplomatic pragmatism, the prime minister also said the country is reaching out to North Korea as well. 

The Southeast Asian country is preparing to reopen its embassy in Pyongyang, partially closed since the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s estranged half-brother at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in February 2017.

“We want to be friendly with all countries in the world … Even North Korea can provide some trade for us. We don’t like confrontation,” he said. 

He described the talk of the North Korean government being behind the assassination as “suspicion” and said it has not affected Malaysia’s security.

“So, now it is time to resume the normal relations between Malaysia and North Korea,” he said in the interview held at his Busan hotel room.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but I find it interesting that the Prime Minister calls it “suspicion” when his own government had Interpol trying to track down the four North Koreans responsible for organizing the murder.

Vietnamese Woman Accused of Murdering Kim Jong-nam Expected to Be Released in Early May After Agree to Plea Deal

The Indonesian woman accused of murdering Kim Jong-nam was released last month and it appears next month the Vietnamese woman involved in the murder will be let go as well:

Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong leaves Shah Alam High Court in Shah Alam, Malaysia, Monday, April 1, 2019. The Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody for the killing of the North Korean leader’s brother Kim Jong Nam pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in a Malaysian court Monday and her lawyer asked for leniency.

A Vietnamese woman who is the only suspect in custody for the killing of the North Korean leader’s brother pleaded guilty to a lesser charge in a Malaysian court on Monday and her lawyer said she could be freed as early as next month.
Doan Thi Huong had faced a murder charge, which carried the death penalty if she was convicted, in the slaying of Kim Jong Nam, who died after being accosted by two women in a Kuala Lumpur airport terminal. Huong nodded as a translator read the new charge to her: voluntarily causing injury with a dangerous weapon, VX nerve agent.
High Court judge Azmi Ariffin sentenced Huong to three years and four months from the day she was arrested on Feb. 15, 2017. Huong’s lawyer Hisyam Teh Poh Teik said his client is expected to be freed by the first week of May, after a one-third reduction in her sentence for good behavior.
“I am happy,” Huong, 30, told reporters as she left the courtroom, adding she thought it was a fair outcome.
While handing out a jail term short of the maximum 10 years the new charge carried, the judge told Huong she was “very, very lucky” and he wished her “all the best.” Vietnamese officials in the courtroom cheered when the decision was announced.

Associated Press

I wonder what the verdict on this would have been if it was a Malaysian murdered like this instead of the son of a foreign despot?

Indonesian Woman Accused of Murdering Kim Jong-nam Released from Prison

It is speculated that this release was a political favor that Malaysia gave to Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo who goes up for re-election next month:

Indonesian Siti Aisyah, center, smiles as she leaves Shah Alam High Court in Shah Alam, Malaysia, Monday, March 11, 2019. The Indonesian woman held two years on suspicion of killing North Korean leader’s half brother Kim Jong Nam was freed from custody Monday after prosecutors unexpectedly dropped the murder charge against her.

 An Indonesian woman held for two years on suspicion of killing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s half brother was freed from custody Monday after Malaysian prosecutors unexpectedly dropped the murder charge against her.
Siti Aisyah cried and hugged her Vietnamese co-defendant, Doan Thi Huong, before leaving the courtroom and being ushered away in an embassy car. She told reporters that she had only learned Monday morning that she would be freed.

“I feel very happy,” she said later at a news conference at the Indonesian Embassy. “I didn’t expect that today will be my freedom day.”
The two young women were accused of smearing VX nerve agent on Kim Jong Nam’s face in an airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur on Feb. 13, 2017. They have said they thought they were taking part in a prank for a TV show. They had been the only suspects in custody after four North Korean suspects fled the country the same morning Kim was killed.
The High Court judge discharged Aisyah without an acquittal after prosecutors applied to drop the murder charge against her. They did not give any reason.

The trial will resume Thursday, with prosecutors expected to reply to a request by Huong’s lawyers asking the government to similarly withdraw the charges against her.
Indonesia’s government said its continual high-level lobbying resulted in Aisyah’s release. The foreign ministry said in a statement that she was “deceived and did not realize at all that she was being manipulated by North Korean intelligence.”
It said Aisyah, a migrant worker, believed that she was part of a reality TV show and never had any intention of killing Kim.

MSN via a reader tip

You can read much more at the link, but I like how they call Aisyah a migrant worker when she was a prostitute in Malaysia and that is how the North Korean agent recruited her.

Anyway her co-defendant Doan Thi Huong from Vietnam I suspect will get released as well since Aisyah was let go. The four North Korean agents that organized the murder all fled back to North Korea which means likely no one will be held responsible for murdering someone with a dangerous nerve agent in the middle of a busy international airport.

Testimony from Murder Trial Shows that Kim Jong-nam May Have Met With US Intelligence Agent

It looks like it is a strong possibility that Kim Jong-nam was meeting with a US intelligence agent a few days before he was assassinated by North Korean agents:

Kim Jong-nam

A police witness said Monday that the estranged half-brother of North Korea’s leader met with an unidentified Korean-American man on a Malaysian resort island four days before he was murdered, as the trial of two women accused of killing him resumed.

Indonesia’s Siti Aisyah, 25, and Vietnam’s Doan Thi Huong, 29, are accused of smearing VX nerve agent on Kim Jong Nam’s face in a crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur last Feb. 13. They pleaded not guilty to murder charges when their trial began Oct. 2. The two are the only suspects in custody, though prosecutors have said four North Koreans who fled the country were also involved.

Chief police investigating officer Wan Azirul Nizam Che Wan Aziz told the court Monday that Kim flew from Macau to Kuala Lumpur last Feb. 6 and went to the northern island of Langkawi two days later. He said Kim met with the Korean-American at a Langkawi hotel the next day, but he didn’t know the man’s identity and it wasn’t related to the $138,000 in cash found in Kim’s backpack when he was murdered.

Wah Azirul was responding to questions from Gooi Soon Seng, Aisyah’s lawyer, who asked him to confirm a report by the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun that Kim had met in Langkawi with a US intelligence agent who was based in Bangkok.

“Until now, the identity of the man is not known,” Wan Azirul told the court. He said he could not remember the hotel name or whether the room was registered under Kim or the man, prompting a lashing from Gooi for his “severe lapse of memory.”  [NY Post]

You can read more at the link, but meeting with a US intelligence agent may have been the final straw for his younger brother Kim Jong-nam to finally decide to assassinate him.

How Female Assassin Siti Aisyah was Recruited By North Korean Agents to Murder Kim Jong-nam

Here is an interesting article from GQ magazine of all places that provides an in-depth look at how

Siti Aisyah, left, and Doan Thi Huong, the women recruited for the murder plot.

The female assassins had been identified on the CCTV footage with almost comic ease—the Vietnamese woman’s white jumper, adorned with LOL, proved easy to track through the grainy footage. Catching her was simple, too: Doan Thi Huong, 29, was arrested the day after the killing, when she returned to the airport. She had been born in a rural Vietnamese village, had her dreams of celebrity dashed when she lasted 20 seconds on Vietnam Idol, and ended up working as an escort in Hanoi, where she’d been recruited by an undercover North Korean agent.

At 2 A.M. the morning after the murder, Malaysian police marched through the dank hallways of the Flamingo Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, in which stained springless mattresses leaned against walls to air out during the day. In a third-floor room, the second alleged assassin, a 25-year-old from Indonesia named Siti Aisyah, had just finished servicing a Malaysian man and sent him on his way when the officers burst through the unlocked door.

From the CCTV footage, Doan’s and Siti’s guilt seemed clear until, under interrogation, they both separately explained that they thought they’d merely slathered Jong-nam with a harmless liquid for a hidden-camera TV show.  (………)

While both women’s lives followed a remarkably similar lopsided arc of disappointment from remote hamlets to seedy nightclubs to prison cells where they now face death, it was Siti’s footprints that I tracked across Asia because, having lived for three years in Indonesia, I had met dozens of vulnerable migrant women who could have suffered her fate. I felt like there was bound to be more to the story than the Malaysian police had reported. And sure enough, the truth I ultimately discovered was far more complicated than I ever could have imagined.

Siti was recruited by the North Koreans at 3 A.M. on January 5, 2017, outside a notorious bar in Kuala Lumpur. On paper, she worked as a masseuse in the Flamingo Hotel’s spa, but when I visited in July, a worker immediately asked, “You want to sleep with a Thai or Indonesian girl?” Later, one of Siti’s friends laughed when I said I’d heard she’d given massages there, declaring, “She was totally sex!”  [GQ Magazine]

You can read the rest of the elaborate scheme the North Koreans put together to recruit Aisyah to conduct the supposed comedy pranks.  Here is a very insightful part of the article:

Nam explained, “Pyongyang wanted to horrify the rest of the world by releasing a chemical weapon at an airport.” By unleashing such weaponry in a place symbolically shared by the global community—an international airport—North Korea was warning everyone not to cross it. As Nam concluded, “Jong-un wants to reign a long time and negotiate as a superpower. The only way to do that is to keep the world in fear of his weapons. He has a grand design, and this is part of it.”

In the end, Pyongyang suffered no significant consequences from the assassination. The people on death row for the murder are two Southeast Asian women, whom Nam believes are not guilty.

This is something world government will have to consider, in response to a preemptive strike against North Korea they could retaliate by releasing VX nerve agents in international airports.  If people thought the aftermath of 9-11 was bad for the airline industry could you imagine what would happen if multiple airports are targeted with VX nerve agents?

US Navy and Malaysian Authorities Continue Search for Missing USS John S. McCain Sailors

It seems like the odds of finding someone alive seem pretty remote, but lets all hope at least one of the missing is alive:

In this photo released by the Royal Malaysian Navy, the U.S guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain is seen after a collision, off Johor, Malaysia, Monday, Aug. 21, 2017.

Ongoing search-and-rescue efforts for 10 missing USS John S. McCain sailors have turned up a number of bodies, Adm. Scott Swift, Pacific Fleet commander, told reporters Tuesday evening.

The Yokosuka-based guided-missile destroyer was traveling to Singapore for a routine port visit early Monday when it collided with the Liberian-flagged Alnic MC oil tanker east of the city-state, injuring five sailors and leaving 10 missing.

During a news conference at Singapore’s Changi Naval Base, Swift said that Navy and Marine Corps divers discovered remains while searching sealed compartments in damaged areas of the ship. The Malaysian navy also discovered remains that could be one of the missing sailors.

“We have a report from the Malaysians … that they have found a body,” Swift said. “We are in the process of effecting the transfer of that body so we can start the identification process and determine whether it’s one of the missing sailors or not. We have discovered other bodies during the diving on McCain today. The divers were able to locate some remains in those sealed compartments during their search.”  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but initially the damage to the ship at least visually doesn’t appear as bad as with the USS Fitzgerald.

Malaysia Expels North Korean Ambassador

Besides expelling the North Korean ambassador the government of Malaysia should close the embassy entirely:

North Korean embassy in Malaysia.

The Malaysian foreign ministry has cited North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol’s refusal to accept formal summons as the reason for its decision to expel him, official sources said Sunday.

On Saturday, Malaysia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced its decision to kick out North Korea’s ambassador, ordering him to leave the country by Monday 6 p.m.

The decision was the latest in a series of punitive actions Malaysia has taken in response to North Korea’s assassination of leader Kim Jong-un’s estranged half brother Kim Jong-nam at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Feb. 13.

Kang was told to show up for a meeting with a Malaysian foreign ministry official on Saturday evening, but neither he nor the North Korean Embassy responded, the Malaysian foreign ministry said in its statement. It said this failure to respond to the summons as the reason for Kang’s expulsion.  [Yonhap]

You can read more at the link.