Following the news that Kim Jong Un’s estranged brother, Kim Jong Nam, was assassinated in Malaysia by two women using an aerosol spray, new details have emerged about the alleged assassins and their motives. The two women told police they believed they were playing roles in a viral video prank, which they hired to participate in for $100 each.
Heat Street revealed Thursday that one of the alleged assailants identified herself to Malaysian authorities as a Vietnamese Internet personality with a YouTube channel. On Friday, police told The Star newspaper (via The Australian) that new CCTV footage taken the day before the assassination showed a group of the same six people implicated in murder wandering around Kuala Lumpur International Airport. It may be evidence of a “dress rehearsal” for the assassination of Jong Nam, who was set to travel to his home in Macau the next day.
The two women involved, 25-year-old Indonesian Siti Aisyah and 28-year-old Vietnamese Doan Thi Huong, have both told police that they believed they were acting for a video prank, popularized by TV shows and more recently by a host of YouTube channels dedicated to pranks and “social experiments.”
Siti Aisyah told police that she was approached in a night club in Kuala Lumpur, where she works, and offered $100 to take part in the prank. Like Doan, the Indonesian says she had no knowledge that she was taking part in an assassination and was not aware of who Kim Jong Nam was.
It took only five seconds of inhaling the toxic substance for Jong Nam’s fate to be sealed. He died en route to the hospital after he sought help from the airport clinic.
It’s not the first time that YouTube pranksters have had run-ins with the law—two Londoners from the “Trollstation” channel were sentenced to jail last year for faking an art heist at National Portrait Gallery; and YouTuber Adam Saleh was kicked off his Delta Airlines flight after he attempted to stoke fears of terrorism by speaking loudly in Arabic and performing a countdown that alarmed other passengers. Both instances of pranking became international news.
YouTube pranks have also been used heavily for political purposes. Popular YouTuber Joey Salads was called out for staging and faking his anti-Trump and Black Lives Matter videos that painted black people in a bad light. Footage purported to show that black people hated Donald Trump so much that they would beat up any of his supporters. Salads, who had hired a group of black actors to vandalize his car in the video, was outed with the hoax by another YouTuber.
But unlike the North Korea assassination, none of these pranks resulted in a person being killed.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
