The Most Insidious Assassination In Modern History: They Thought It Was A Prank
On February 13, 2017 at Kuala Lumpur Airport, two women acted out what they believed was a hidden-camera prank. Minutes later, Kim Jong-nam was dead. Behind it was VX nerve agent, two-part chemistry, and weeks of carefully built trust.
On the morning of February 13, 2017, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport 2 (KLIA2), security cameras capture something at almost comic speed. Two women step out of the crowd, approach a man, smear something across his face, and walk away laughing. The visual language feels familiar, the YouTube-era prank template: quick contact, laughter, exit.
But the tone of “this is a joke” collapses into reality within minutes. The man rapidly becomes ill and dies. And he is not just anyone: Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Two Ordinary Lives
The most unsettling part is that the attackers do not look like professional assassins, because they are not.Siti Aisyah is a young Indonesian woman trying to get by in Malaysia, finding work, sending money home, attempting to steady her life.Đoàn Thị Hương is Vietnamese. She chases opportunities through small-scale modeling and social media gigs. Their common ground is simple: that feeling of “if a job comes, I can hold on.”Then an offer arrives, in a tone that sounds familiar: “We’re filming an entertainment show. Hidden-camera pranks. Easy work, good money.” In 2017, that sentence does not sound strange at all.
Weeks Of Trust-Building
The operation is not built in a single day. It is built over weeks. The core claim in the defense is this: the women did not take a one-off “role.” They performed multiple “shoots.”
Short scenes in crowded places where they smear cream on faces, make brief contact, laugh, and run. Repetitions that look normal. Small payments. For the mind, this forms a simple loop: there is a crew, there is a task, I did it, we laughed, I got paid, it’s over. Over time, questions fade and the job becomes routine.
That is why the instruction they receive on the morning of February 13 does not feel new. It looks like just another scene in the same format.
February 13: The Final “Shoot” At The Airport
Kim Jong-nam is waiting near a self check-in area at KLIA2 when, around 9:00 a.m., he is targeted by the two women. In the footage, the attack is over in seconds. The women separately go to a restroom, wash their hands, and leave.
Soon after, Kim Jong-nam seeks help, deteriorates rapidly, and dies. According to Malaysian authorities, the substance used was VX, a Schedule 1 chemical weapon-class nerve agent.
VX And Two-Part Chemistry
What makes VX terrifying is not only its lethality, but also how its use can be engineered to fit a “scene.” In the account that reached the public, the critical detail is this: the substances the women carried were designed so they were not fully lethal on their own. Two separate components become deadly when combined on the target’s face, producing the VX effect.
This two-part design makes the operation practical and, crucially, plausibly deniable.
VX falls under the chemical weapons banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, and that is one reason the case echoed worldwide.
Perfect Plausible Deniability
The insidious aspect of this assassination is not just chemistry. The script matters just as much.
When the women are arrested, their line sounds unbelievable at first: “We were on a prank show.” The disturbing twist is that parts of this defense can fit the structure of what happened. Repeated shoots, small payments, a consistent format, the feeling of being “talent.” That architecture gives the planners a powerful advantage: the hand that delivers the strike may genuinely not understand it is delivering a strike.
Around the same time, some North Korea-linked suspects named in the investigation leave the country, and the case escalates into a diplomatic crisis. It stops looking like street crime and moves into the shadow of the state.
The Trial And The Exit Door
In Malaysia, a murder charge is severe, and the case becomes a global spectacle. The outcome, however, resolves in an unexpected way.
The charge against Siti Aisyah is dropped on March 11, 2019, and she is released.
For Đoàn Thị Hương, the charge is later reduced. She accepts a lesser offense, receives a 3 year 4 month sentence, and is released in 2019.
What remains is the weight of one sentence: “I thought it was a prank.” Because the most unsettling possibility is that they really did.
Why Was Kim Jong-nam The Target?
Kim Jong-nam had lived outside North Korea for years, with weakened ties to the regime, and was often described as a figure who sometimes sounded critical. What made him “dangerous” was not that he commanded an army. It was his name, his past, and his symbolic gravity.
Why This Still Feels So Frightening
This case shows how modern assassination can be made camera-friendly. On one side, a chemical weapon-level agent. On the other, psychological normalization built through weeks of routine “work.” In the end, the classic assassin profile disappears. In its place are people who believe they are simply performing a role.
The lesson is simple and cold: you do not always need a fanatic to kill someone. Sometimes you only need manipulable people, a well-written script, and patience. The rest is chemistry.
Documentary Recommendation
A film that tells this story through the women’s perspective is Assassins (2020), directed by Ryan White.