A new documentary, Assassins, spent years untangling the death of Kim Jong Nam & the real story of the two women charged with his murder
In February 2017, two young women — 25-year-old masseuse Siti Aisyah and 28-year-old Doan Thi Huong, a waitress who dreamed of a career in show business — unwittingly assassinated the exiled brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un as he passed through a Malaysian airport. The women, their hands glistening with a VX nerve agent they smeared on Kim Jong Nam's eyes & face, thought the entire thing was a prank khổng lồ be filmed for a show; they mistook the liquid VX, which can be lethal in any dose, for some kind of oil. Surveillance cameras caught the shirt Huong had worn just for the occasion: In big đen letters, it declared "LOL."
Both Aisyah và Huong, who washed their hands before leaving the airport, were arrested within days — touching off years of legal proceedings và international truyền thông media attention in large part because their lawyers said they had been tricked.
Investigators, however, were unswayed. Tricked into poisoning someone in public? Aisyah và Huong were accused of murder. If convicted, each would be put to lớn death.
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Eight North Koreans were suspected in the attack, but only one was temporarily jailed. Four of them had returned home before the investigation even began.
South Korean intelligence officials said there was "a standing order" for an assassination since 2011, but the North Korean government insisted it had no involvement. Perhaps the man had simply dropped dead of a heart attack.
Kim Jong nam giới — who five years earlier sent a letter khổng lồ his brother seeking mercy, pleading that his family had "nowhere to hide" — died en route lớn the hospital after the poison had exhausted the muscles of his heart and lungs. He was quoted in his final minutes telling authorities he had been sprayed with a liquid. "Very painful," he said. "Very painful."
Documentarians Jessica Hargrave and Ryan trắng were only vaguely aware of any of this when, a few months after Kim was killed, the phone rang. A journalist colleague who was working on a feature for GQ had more to lớn share, he said, about what had really happened. Hargrave và White — a creative duo: she produces, he directs — had just finished investigating a nun's cold-case killing for a Netflix miniseries.
"It just seemed so unbelievable," Hargrave remembers now. "We went in thinking, This can't be true, but it's still worth looking into."
Says White: "When the heart of your story is one of the most dangerous regimes, it adds a whole layer, I think, of fear và danger to the filmmaking process. That was always haunting us throughout the making of this film. We knew we were revealing things about what the North Korean regime had done, & therefore was there going to lớn be retribution? Were we being watched, or was our physical safety or cybersecurity at risk?"
The documentary, available on demand, draws on interviews with Aisyah and Huong và their families as well as their attorneys & outside experts and, most startling and most intimate, surveillance footage around the killing as well as troves of messages and social truyền thông media posts from both women.
In sum Assassins provides perhaps the most complete picture of Kim's death, the forces that set it into motion and the two women who — when the other assassins had fled — were left to lớn face the justice system, not really aware of what they had done.
The public had trouble making sense of them, too. Were Aisyah và Huong trained killers, pleading naïveté? Or were they girlish, almost-too-perfect pawns of a government with a lurid reputation for public executions?
The headlines document what happened next, after the women were arrested và put on trial: Aisyah was released late into her prosecution, her charge dropped under diplomatic pressure from her home country of Indonesia; Huong, of Vietnam, pleaded to lớn a lesser crime of causing injury with a dangerous weapon và has since been released from prison.
"This is a very absurdist, surreal story," white tells ongirlgames.com. "But at the center of it, it's sort of a cautionary tale of the dangers of social media, the internet, how ongirlgames.com leverage those when they're seeking fame or a better life or a better paycheck. That story is universal. While Doan và Siti probably ended up in the most dangerous of situations, where that can go wrong, the world that they were ensnared in is happening all over the place for young ongirlgames.com."
Vietnamese defendant Doan Thi Huong (R) và Indonesian defendant Siti Aishah (2nd, L) are escorted by police personnel at the low-cost carrier Kuala Lumpur International Airport 2 (KLIA2) in Sepang
Siti Aishah (second from left) and Doan Thi Huong (right) are escorted by police during a visit on Oct. 24, 2017, lớn the scene of Kim Jong Nam’s killing as part of the trial proceedings.
The film has the structure of a spy thriller but a beating heart. "The main trust of the film is humanizing them," trắng says. "That's sort of the magic of documentary filmmaking, is that it allows you the time to really explore those types of things."
"It felt like, ourselves included, nobody knew what the truth behind this assassination was & definitely nobody knew whatever happened to lớn the women," white says.
And yes, Assassins is outlandish. But so are the events it meticulously documents. Indeed, as the film makes clear, the women believed they had been hired for actual videos và participated in multiple actual online pranks with their handlers before their final job.
"I think what really started khổng lồ turn the corner for us was as we got closer with their defense teams and were able to get access to lớn the materials, specifically for me when we started khổng lồ be able to see their social truyền thông media profiles và to read their text messages," Hargrave says.
"We just got unfiltered logs of their correspondence, including the correspondence with the North Korean operatives," Hargrave continues, "and you can watch over time as each of them is preyed upon, tailored khổng lồ their own vulnerabilities and pulled deeper and deeper into the web."
In the documentary, one of Aisyah's attorneys recalls Aisyah's shock at the charge against her. "Siti, she in fact thought that she was part of a prank show và we had khổng lồ persuade her, lớn tell her, 'Look, someone really died.' "
Hargrave says they began filming in 2017. A couple of weeks after that fateful hotline from their reporter colleague, trắng flew khổng lồ Malaysia. They worked for some two và a half to lớn three years.
It bore fruit. In one reversal, the documentary describes how the police said a key witness, a taxi driver, was untraceable — & then the film immediately cuts to him on camera.
The voluminous surveillance camera files were another boon lớn the investigation — "Once you could watch the behavior of the women as it was unfolding, you started to lớn realize it corroborated everything that they were saying," white says — and, with time, so was the cooperation of them và their families.
There were challenges in gaining their trust. "The whole story of the documentary is that these women were previously ensnared by a film crew promising only good intentions. Here we come, doing the exact same thing," trắng says.
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It was about two years into production that white met them at all: "They had their own very understandable concerns in saying, 'I'm not sure if I want to lớn participate in this.' Thankfully, they both came around."
"It's difficult for a film to take so long," Hargrave says, "but it was also beneficial for us so that we could build those relationships over time."
Siti Aisyah (right) appears during the press conference at the Embassy of The Republic of Indonesia in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 11, 2019.
White says the team "spent a lot of time in both of the villages where they were from," and Assassins details the differing lives that brought Aisyah and Huong, who had never met, together at the airport in 2017.
Aisyah và Huong had lived in villages in Indonesia and Vietnam that were in the orbit of larger cities. "Doan ended up in Hanoi seeking fame there, và Siti ended up in Jakarta in the sweatshop industry, which led khổng lồ her whole trajectory of seeking a better job outside of Indonesia," white says.
The documentary also shows what happened khổng lồ the women after the trial & after the crush of media attention. White notes how Huong, who had gushed of her hopes of acting và singing and once appeared on Vietnam Idol, became wary of public attention — of even having her name said where someone might overhear. "Doan is very sensitive, extremely sensitive, far more than I ever expected," he says.
Via email, Huong tells ongirlgames.com she relied on her faith while she was in custody & during the trial — "I prayed to God four times a day" — and that she has since returned home with her family, where she works in online retail. "I have khổng lồ take care of my family. Staying with my family makes me happy," she says.
Doan Thi Huong answers questions from the media at the airport in Hanoi, Vietnam, in May 2019 after being released from prison.
Aisyah, white says, has also returned to her hometown in Indonesia much different from her life in Kuala Lumpur. In Assassins, Aisyah describes moving first to Jakarta — where she married & divorced & had a son at 17 — and then went khổng lồ Kuala Lumpur, looking for better work.
Huong, he says, was in tears watching Assassins. "She said she loved the film … but that she was very upset with herself in the scene where she returns khổng lồ Vietnam & she's smiling a lot at that press conference."
She did not want to make the wrong impression with her joy. By then she had learned that other ongirlgames.com see in you what they want.
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