Indonesia trying to verify if citizen involved in Kim death

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s foreign ministry said it is trying to verify the nationality of a woman with an Indonesian passport who was arrested in Malaysia on Thursday (Feb 16) for suspected involvement in the killing of the North Korean leader’s half brother.

Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, director of Indonesian Citizen Protection at the Foreign Ministry, said on Thursday that millions of Indonesians work in neighbouring Malaysia and the passport seized by Malaysian police could have been lost or stolen.

“We have been trying to verify those reports with our embassy in Malaysia as soon as we heard about that, because this is not the first time that an Indonesian reportedly committed a crime just based on the bearer of an Indonesian passport, but then the bearer was not an Indonesian citizen,” he said.

Malaysian police have now arrested two women in the death of Kim Jong Nam, who was reportedly poisoned this week by a pair of female assassins as he waited for a flight in Malaysia.

They said the passport with the woman arrested Thursday was in the name of Siti Aishah, 25, from Serang in Banten province which neighbours the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. The woman arrested on Wednesday had Vietnamese travel documents bearing the name Doan Thi Huong, 28.

As of Thursday afternoon, Vietnam’s foreign ministry had not responded to a request for comment sent Wednesday night.

An Indonesian news portal published a photo of the identification page of an Indonesian passport belonging to Siti Aisyah that differed from the details released by Malaysian police only in the spelling of the name. Aishah is a spelling typically used in Malaysia whereas Aisyah is commonly used in Indonesia.

Several million Indonesians work in Malaysia as maids and construction and plantation workers. Agents that recruit workers in Indonesia often provide them with altered or forged documents.

Investigators in Malaysia are trying to shed light on the death of Kim, which has set off set off waves of speculation over whether North Korea dispatched a hit squad to kill him. AP