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'A beautiful soul': the Kim Jong-nam that I knew

Kim Jong-nam’s round face darkened as the conversation turned to the subject of his father’s funeral. 

The eldest son of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il was sitting in a restaurant in Singapore, describing his brief trip home to pay respects at his father’s vast state funeral in December 2011. 

The short visit to snowy Pyongyang had rattled him and he left as soon as he could, he said, fearing that if he stayed longer he might not be able to leave. He spoke for only a moment about his half-brother, Kim Jong-un, the new leader of North Korea.    

“He said he couldn’t understand why his brother disliked him so much,” said a friend, who was with him at the restaurant. “He said it in this innocuous, childlike way and we moved on to a different topic.”

The young dictator’s hatred of his older half-sibling appears to have caught up with Mr Kim in the budget terminal of Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Monday. 

As the 46-year-old stood at a self check-in counter he was approached by two women - suspected North Korean agents - who sprayed his face with an unknown toxic substance. He died minutes later en route to hospital.

The brazen killing has created headlines around the world and sparked endless analysis and speculation on why the North Korean state would decide to carry out such a high-profile and provocative murder. 

But this is an account of the man who died, a brief snapshot of the life that ended in chaos and confusion in the back of a Malaysian ambulance. It is narrated by a man we will call Anwar, a friend of Mr Kim’s who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for his own security. 

Mr Kim was born in 1970, the product of an affair between his father and the Korean actress Song Hye-rim. As the eldest son of Kim Jong-Il he was also thought to the natural heir as leader of North Korea.

But he was cast from his favoured position in 2001 when he was caught trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport from the Dominican Republican, apparently trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland. He was sent into exile soon after.  

Anwar first got to know Mr Kim in 2013 in Singapore, where the North Korean was living part of the time as well as in the Chinese territory of Macau.

Mr Kim was a member of small set of wealthy foreigners who like to party and take advantage of Singapore’s upscale restaurants and clubs. Many of his friends were Japanese but his circle included young socialites from across Asia.        

He went by Kim but some of his friends also knew him as Lee. He could joke and tell stories in fluent French, a reflection of his schooling in Switzerland, but also spoke good English with a heavy accent.

“I met him at a fancy Japanese restaurant. He hung out with a bunch of Japanese entrepreneurs who happened to know some of my friends and we were introduced at dinner,” Anwar recalled.

“He was wearing this weird polo shirt with a pocket and had this really loud-looking red passport sticking out of it. I asked him what passport that was and he said it was a North Korean diplomatic passport. A friend later told me he was the son of Kim Jong-il but I thought he was lying to me.”

The two men connected over Paris. Mr Kim’s son, Kim Han-sol, had just graduated from the United World College boarding school in Bosnia and Herzegovina and was heading to France to study at the elite Sciences Po university. Anwar had spent time in Paris and Mr Kim was eager to hear about his experiences.      

Anwar found the North Korean to be an easy-going, cheerful man who rarely spoke about his background or his native country. “He would say I’m North Korean but I’m not in politics. I think he said his family was in politics but he wasn’t. He didn’t talk about his family because he only talked about the good things in life.”

Mr Kim is reported to have had six children by two different wives but he was especially proud of Kim Han-sol, sometimes known as Donald, who he talked about often. Donald made his own headlines in 2011 when the media discovered online profiles where he spoke about hunger in North Korea. 

Mr Kim did not appear to work and always had money for food and drink but Anwar did not recall his life as particularly ostentatious. He noted that Mr Kim flew TigerAir, a budget airline, when he was commuting between Singapore and Macau. 

His time at Singapore’s bars and clubs came to an abrupt halt when he was diagnosed with diabetes. “He found out he was diabetic and he stopped drinking totally,” said Anwar. “That’s when our friendship became more meaningful because we started hanging out during the day, we started going to dinner.”

The two men talked about Anwar’s work and Mr Kim’s family and about “Condé Nast things” like fine wine, good food and traveling. He moved around without bodyguards and with no obvious concerns about his safety. 

“He was extremely chilled out about his safety in Singapore,” Anwar said. “He was really carefree, really chilled. You would like him if you met him, in fact you would adore him.”

The pair met for the last time time in Macau in 2016, five years into Kim Jong-un’s reign in North Korea. 

Anwar had read about the bloody purges that Kim Jong-un had been carrying out against North Korean officials, including his own uncle, but found his friend to be in as cheerful a mood as ever. They parted ways and, aside from a few brief messages, had no further contact.

On Monday morning, Anwar received a message from another friend telling him about Kim Jong-nam’s death in Malaysia.  

“I cried when I found out about the news,” Anwar said. “What shook me was how a really nice guy - a beautiful soul - could be butchered in such a way.”