Kim Jong Un’s nephew was taken into protective custody by the CIA just days after his dad was murdered with a nerve agent, according to a report.
Kim Han-sol, 25, sought the help of a Free Joseon, a group of “freedom fighters” aiming to bring down Un’s “evil” North Korean dictatorship, just days after his father was assassinated at a crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur in 2017, the group told the New Yorker.
Sol was considered by many to be the rightful heir of the former Great Leader, his grandfather Kim Jong Il, and capturing him dead or alive would be a “zero-sum game,” the group told the magazine.
Free Joseon’s New York-based leader Adrian Hong also said he had “never met a kid with so much money,” because Sol’s father — the estranged half-brother of the Hermit Kingdom’s despot — had “stashed away a lot of cash during his life.”
Sol fled Macau with his mother and teenage sister after noticing that their police guard disappeared after the murder of his father, the report said.
The family then spent a full day in an airport lounge in the Taiwanese capital Taipei with a Free Joseon agent who tried to negotiate with at least three countries to take them in.
When they finally arranged a flight to the Netherlands, the ticket agent refused to let them board — and hours later they were confronted by two men who identified themselves as CIA officers, the New Yorker reported.
The agents insisted on joining Sol and his family when it finally got a flight to Amsterdam — yet they never arrived at the other end, Free Joseon said.
The last known sighting of him was a short video that the freedom-fighter group took of him thanking them for their help just before he boarded the flight.
Multiple sources told the New Yorker that the agents took Han Sol and his family elsewhere. It was not clear if that was in the Netherlands or to another country altogether, author Suki Kim wrote.
“I assume [Free Joseon] lost Han Sol to the CIA,” Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA officer and a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the New Yorker.
The CIA refused to comment to the New Yorker about the story.
Share this article:
Source: Read Full Article