This story deserves more media attention.
New York Times 4.2.2019
SHAH ALAM, Malaysia — A Vietnamese woman charged in the airport assassination of the half brother of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, was sentenced on Monday after pleading to a lesser charge of causing bodily harm.
The defendant, Doan Thi Huong, 30, was one of two women who smeared VX nerve agent on the face of Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un’s elder brother, in February 2017. She was ordered to serve 40 months in prison.
“The girls should not have been charged in the first place,” Ms. Huong’s lawyer, Hisham Teh, told reporters
Ultimately, though, “we are happy because ultimately she can go home within one month,” he added. Mr. Teh argued she should have been freed sooner, as her co-defendant was, because she was “naïve and gullible and was exploited.”
The lawyer said she would be released on May 4, after time served and an additional sentence reduction.
Her co-defendant, Siti Aisyah, 27, was freed three weeks ago after intensive lobbying by the Indonesian government, including a personal appeal from President Joko Widodo to Malaysia’s prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad.
Officials still believe that the assassination was organized by North Korean agents: four North Korean men who were believed to have orchestrated the plot and then flew out of Malaysia within hours of the killing. Three other North Koreans implicated in the attack were later allowed to leave the country.
No one other than the two women ever faced charges.
