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Jurnalists surrounding a North Korean official’s car as it left the embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Wednesday. The North has rejected suggestions that it was involved in Kim Jong-nam’s death. Credit Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters
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SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea denied responsibility on Thursday for Kim Jong-nam’s death, accusing the Malaysian authorities of fabricating evidence of Pyongyang’s involvement under the influence of the North’s archrival, South Korea.
With the North’s reclusive government on the defensive about the Feb. 13 killing of Mr. Kim, the estranged half brother of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, at the Kuala Lumpur airport, a statement attributed to the North Korean Jurists Committee said that the greatest share of responsibility for the death “rests with the government of Malaysia” because he died there. And in what could be seen as a threat to Malaysia, the statement noted that North Korea is a “nuclear weapons state.”
But in a case that has been filled with mysteries and odd plot twists, North Korea still would not acknowledge that the man killed was indeed Kim Jong-nam. And it gave no indication that it would agree to Malaysia’s demands to question a senior staff member at the North Korean Embassy in Kuala Lumpur in the investigation into Mr. Kim’s death.
Meanwhile, relatives and acquaintances of the two women Malaysia has accused of carrying out the killing — by applying poison to Mr. Kim’s face as North Korean agents looked on — insisted that they must have been duped into doing so, though the Malaysian authorities say otherwise.
“I don’t believe Huong did such a thing,” said Doan Van Thanh, father of Doan Thi Huong, a 28-year-old Vietnamese woman being held in Malaysia. “She was a very timid girl. When she saw a rat or frog, she would scream.”
Mr. Thanh, a 63-year-old veteran who was wounded in 1972 during the war with the United States, said he had seen little of his daughter in recent years. He said she left the family’s home, in a small farming village south of Hanoi, at 17 to attend community college, where she studied to be a pharmacist.
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Among the suspects arrested in Mr. Kim’s death are Doan Thi Huong, 28, and Siti Aisyah, 25, who the authorities say were recruited, trained and equipped by North Koreans. Credit Royal Malaysian Police
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She later left Vietnam to work in Malaysia without telling her family, Mr. Thanh said. He said she rarely visited. When she returned home in January for the Tet holiday, he said, she had little money for the customary gifts and stayed only a few days.
On Thursday in Nghia Binh, Ms. Huong’s hometown, her brother, Doan Van Binh, said that she posted on Facebook under the alias Ruby Ruby. Her Facebook photographs and the attached location information appear to show that she has visited Malaysia twice since January, and her Facebook friends include several people who write in Korean.
Mr. Binh said that Ms. Huong had also appeared briefly in a singing contest on the Vietnamese television show “Vietnam Idol” in 2016. In a short video clip of the performance, a panel of judges rejected Ms. Huong after she sang just one line: “I want to stop breathing gloriously so that the loving memory will not fade.”
North Korea has called for the release of Ms. Huong, an Indonesian woman and a North Korean man who are being held by Malaysia in connection with the death of Mr. Kim.
The statement Thursday from the Jurists Committee was cited by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, in the first comment on the killing from the North’s official media. The statement accused the Malaysian authorities of pursuing a case “full of loopholes and contradictions” that proved that its investigators “intended to frame us.” It said Malaysia had done so under South Korean influence.
According to the statement, the Malaysian Foreign Ministry and the local hospital first told the North Korean Embassy in Kuala Lumpur that Mr. Kim had died of “heart stroke,” asking North Korea to take the body and cremate it.
But Malaysian officials’ attitude began changing after the South Korean news media, citing anonymous sources, reported that Mr. Kim had been poisoned, according to the North Korean statement.
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Doan Van Thanh, 63, the father of Doan Thi Huong, one of the women accused in the killing, at home this week in Nam Dinh, Vietnam. He insists his daughter was too timid to have killed anyone. Credit Duong Minh Hoang/Associated Press
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“The Malaysian secret police got involved in the case and recklessly made it an established fact” that the death had been a poisoning, according to the North Korean statement, which did not refer to Mr. Kim by name.
The statement questioned how Ms. Huong and the Indonesian woman accused in the killing, Siti Aisyah, 25, could have survived if, as Malaysian officials said, they used their hands to administer a deadly toxin to Mr. Kim.
Ms. Siti grew up in Indonesia in similar circumstances to Ms. Huong’s, in a small farming village called Sindangsari, about four hours east of Jakarta. She went to school through sixth grade, married at 16 and divorced at 20, according to family members and official documents.
Family members and Indonesian officials have said they believe she was tricked into thinking that the attack on Mr. Kim was part of a comedy video, involving spraying liquid on unwitting victims in public. The Malaysian authorities have said that both women were aware that the liquid was toxic.
Rahmat Yusri, the head of the Jakarta neighborhood where Ms. Siti lived while she was married, said she was an unlikely assassin. He recalled that she did not have close friends.
“She is village girl, a naïve girl with a low education,” he said. “How can I believe that she’s a murderer? Particularly that she killed a famous person?”
The Malaysian authorities have said that four North Koreans were believed to have directed the attack and that they fled to their homeland after it was carried out. On Wednesday, the Malaysian police said they were seeking to question an official at the North Korean Embassy, Hyon Kwang Song, in the case.
Channel NewsAsia, a Singaporean news agency, reported Thursday that Mr. Hyon had been recorded on closed circuit cameras at the airport after the killing, seeing off the four North Koreans as they boarded a flight on the journey back to their homeland.
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Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul, and Richard C. Paddock from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Chau Doan contributed reporting from Nghia Binh, Vietnam, Fira Abdurachman from Jakarta and Mike Ives from Hong Kong.
