Inadvertent Assassins

[Anchor Lead]

Two Southeast Asian women who are on trial in Malaysia for the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s estranged half-brother say they are innocent. Their defense has told the court that the women met with North Korean agents pretending to be Japanese TV producers filming a prank show, and that they were used as inadvertent assassins.

[Pkg]

It was back in January of 2016, a month before the attack, when Indonesian woman Siti Aisyah, who carried out the assassination of Kim Jong-nam together with a Vietnamese woman, first met up with a North Korean man, according to her lawyer. A taxi driver, whom she had met at a night club, suggested that she appear in a candid camera show and introduced a North Korean man named Ri Ji-u to her. Ri deceived her by introducing himself as a Japanese man shooting a Japanese TV show.

[Soundbite] Gooi Soon Seng(Siti Aisyah's Lawyer) : "An offer of a prank show, on a video prank show which will be aired on Youtube in Japan."

Her lawyer said that Ri showed her a video of a woman smearing hot sauce on a stranger's face and told her to rehearse the same prank on three people right there and then. The lawyer claimed that the accused Southeast Asian women had been deceived by the North Koreans pretending to be Japanese and they thought that they were filming a Japanese prank show. Previously, the Malaysian police said that the ringleader Ri Jae-nam had used the alias "Hanamori." With the North Korean suspects still on the run, the trials of the two women indicted for killing Kim Jong-nam will resume on February 8th.