October 2, 2017
Two women accused of poisoning (click here) the estranged half brother of North Korea's ruler in a brazen airport assassination eight month ago have pleaded not guilty at the start of their trial in Malaysia's High Court.
Siti Aisyah of Indonesia and Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam are accused smearing Kim Jong Nam's face with the banned VX nerve agent on February 13 at a crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur, killing him within about 20 minutes.
The women have previously said they thought they were playing a harmless prank for a hidden-camera show. They face the death penalty if convicted.
Prosecutors will then start to call their witnesses, with the first few likely to be medical experts to establish the cause of death, said Hisyam Teh Poh Teik, Huong's lawyer....
I think the global community is getting better at the intercept. Congratulations.
October 2, 2017
Last August, (click here) a secret message was passed from Washington to Cairo warning about a mysterious vessel steaming toward the Suez Canal. The bulk freighter named Jie Shun was flying Cambodian colours but had sailed from North Korea, the warning said, with a North Korean crew and an unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarps.
Armed with this tip, customs agents were waiting when the ship entered Egyptian waters. They swarmed the vessel and discovered, concealed under bins of iron ore, a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades. It was, as a United Nations report later concluded, the "largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea."
But who were the rockets for? The Jie Shun's final secret would take months to resolve and would yield perhaps the biggest surprise of all: The buyers were the Egyptians themselves.
A UN investigation uncovered a complex arrangement in which Egyptian business executives ordered millions of dollars worth of North Korean rockets for the country's military while also taking pains to keep the transaction hidden, according to US. officials and Western diplomats familiar with the findings....
...North Korea's booming illicit arms trade is an outgrowth of a legitimate business that began decades ago. In the 1960s and '70s, the Soviet Union gave away conventional weapons - and, in some cases, entire factories for producing them - to developing countries as a way of winning allies and creating markets for Soviet military technology. Many of these client states would standardise the use of communist-bloc munitions and weapons systems in their armies, thus ensuring a steady demand for replacement parts and ammunition that would continue well into the future.
Sensing an opportunity, North Korea obtained licenses to manufacture replicas of Soviet and Chinese weapons, ranging from assault rifles and artillery rockets to naval frigates and battle tanks. Arms factories sprouted in the 1960s that soon produced enough weapons to supply North Korea's vast military, as well as a surplus that could be sold for cash.
By the end of the Cold War, North Korea's customer base spanned four continents and included dozens of countries, as well as armed insurgencies. The demand for discount North Korean weapons would continue long after the Soviet Union collapsed, and even after North Korea came under international censure and economic isolation because of its nuclear weapons program, said Andrea Berger, a North Korea specialist and senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
