One of the women, wearing jeans and a grey top, had emerged from behind a pillar to approach him, put her hands over his eyes, rubbed them down his face and ran away. Shortly afterwards, the second woman, wearing a white sweatshirt emblazoned with the word ‘LOL’, approached from a different direction and did the same thing. She is then captured almost skipping towards the bathroom, holding her hands out and glancing knowingly at the CCTV camera. In another clip, Kim Jong-nam, already limping, heads for the medical clinic with an airport employee and a police officer. He would be dead within 20 minutes.

After the assassination hit the news, there was immediate speculation that Kim Jong-un was behind it. And in the days that followed, the incident took on even more sinister implications. Not only was it the first time that North Korea had used chemical weapons in an attack, but it became apparent that the two assassins had been treated as if they were utterly expendable. Siti Aisyah, then 25, from Indonesia, who was working as a ‘masseuse’ at the Flamingo Hotel, and Doan Thi Huong, 28, a Vietnamese waitress, were easily tracked down and arrested; they had made no secret of their whereabouts. Although they didn’t know each other, both claimed that they were taking part in a prank, which was being filmed for TV. They had no intention of harming anyone. They were, they said, working for a Japanese production company.

When the Indonesian ambassador visited Siti in jail after her arrest, she thought he was part of the prank. ‘You’re kidding,’ she said. ‘I was doing a video shoot.’ Later, when she was shown a newspaper saying that Kim Jong-namhad died, she started to cry.

Four North Korean men who allegedly orchestrated the plot were also at the airport, monitoring proceedings. When the assignment was complete, they changed their clothes, cleared immigration, were ushered on to a plane by a high-level North Korean embassy staff member, and took a circuitous route to Pyongyang.

The news was broken by South Korean media the following day, and a diplomatic crisis ensued. In Kuala Lumpur, police raided the home of a North Korean chemist called Ri Jong Chol, who was thought to be behind the manufacture of the nerve agent. But in a press conference, the North Korean ambassador denounced attempts to ‘damage the image of our republic’, with an envoy later claiming that the victim had probably died of a heart attack. The ambassador was expelled from Malaysia, and in return nine Malaysian citizens were prevented from leaving North Korea, effectively held hostage. All this happened during Donald Trump’s first two months in office.

‘And I think that that’s such a fascinating part of it,’ says Jessica Hargrave, producer of the new film Assassins, which tells the story of the two women’s desperate fight for justice. ‘Because in terms of making it a spectacle, four governments were involved – the murder of a North Korean man in Malaysia by an Indonesian woman and a Vietnamese woman – [and] it became so much more of an international incident.’

The chief suspects had already left the country, and in the weeks that followed three more were allowed to depart – in return for the Malaysian citizens being allowed to leave North Korea.

That left the two women to bear the burden. Who were they? And – the big question – did they know what they were doing? Had they been trained to kill, or were they really duped into thinking they were taking part in an innocent prank?

The consequences could be dire: under Malaysian law, the sentence for murder is death. If found guilty, they would be hanged.

Siti Aisyah was born in 1992, and grew up in a small village in Indonesia. As a teenager she found work in a sweatshop, making clothes. ‘I saw my family was poor and I wanted to help, so I went to Jakarta,’ she says in the film. She worked from 7.30am until midnight, and ended up marrying the owner’s son and having a baby. She was 17. They divorced in 2012, and Siti left her son with her father-in-law’s family and went to look for work in Kuala Lumpur – where she thought she’d have a better chance. ‘I didn’t have any work experience so I had no other choice,’ she says. ‘I was sad but I had to find work and money to eat.’ She got a job at the Flamingo Hotel – officially as a masseuse but in reality as a sex worker.

When it came to her involvement in the murder of Kim Jong-nam, Siti was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. After finishing work one day in January 2017, she had gone to a nightclub to trawl for clients, and having no luck, was sitting on the kerb outside when she was approached by a taxi driver she knew, ‘John’. He said someone he knew was looking for girls to take part in videos. Would she be interested?

‘And she said yes,’ says Ryan White, the director of Assassins. ‘John had asked other girls, with no luck. And that’s one of those real sliding-door moments, right? Where circumstances in her life conspired and where she was willing to say yes. And her life will never be the same because of that moment.’

Siti and Doan’s plight came to White’s attention in late 2017, when he was contacted by the journalist Doug Bock Clark, who had written an extensive article about the murder for GQ magazine (Clark became the film’s executive producer). White and his team visited Malaysia before the trial, interviewing the women’s lawyers, who gave them unprecedented access to the evidence, and travelled to Indonesia and Vietnam to meet the women’s families.

John introduced Siti to ‘James’, a North Korean who pretended to be Japanese, who told Siti he was making a hidden-camera show. At their first meeting he asked her to perform a prank – slathering baby oil on a woman – for which she was paid $96. Over the course of the next month, she took part in various other pranks, which James called ‘spoofing’. And in early February, under the direction of ‘Mr Chang’, who had replaced James, she started ‘practising’ on people at Kuala Lumpur airport.

Doan was recruited more discerningly. She grew up in Nam Dinh, Vietnam. Her father was a farmer and Doan, who did well in school, went to college in Hanoi and studied accounting. When she couldn’t get a job in that field she worked as a waitress, though she aspired to be an actor. She did some modelling, reportedly worked as an escort, and even made a brief appearance on Vietnam Idol.

In her statement to the police, she said she had received a call from a friend who asked if she’d be interested in making a ‘funny video’ (she had already appeared in a genuine prank show, similar to Jackass), and went to a bar in Hanoi where she met ‘Mr Y’, who asked how much she wanted for a month’s work. ‘I felt shy but I asked for $1,000.’ In the end she travelled to several cities rehearsing pranks.

As pranks go, running up behind someone and smearing baby oil on their face is pretty rubbish. But there’s no accounting for taste, says White, laughing. Doan’s lawyer seemed to find the idea funny. ‘When he was watching prank videos, he was giggling like a little boy.’

The Prank

The night before the murder, while Siti was celebrating her 25th birthday at the Hard Rock Cafe in Kuala Lumpur, Doan was seen on CCTV at a hotel near the airport, carrying a giant teddy bear, which she’d been given to rehearse with. ‘This woman in a foreign city carrying a carnival-sized teddy bear through hotels,’ says White. ‘I’ve seen our film described as darkly comic at times and I can’t disagree with that. It’s a very sad film in the sense that someone died, and these women’s lives will never be the same, but the day-today logistics of the plot are so ridiculous.’

The next day, 13 February, Siti met Mr Chang in a coffee shop at the airport. There would be another woman taking part in today’s prank, too, he said. He told her to look away while he applied an oily substance to her hands, which smelled different to her from the normal baby oil, and pointed out a man who turned out to be Kim Jong-nam in the concourse. Siti approached him and put her hands over his face. ‘Sorry!’ she said.

‘He reacted like he was scared,’ said Siti later. ‘It scared me too. So I ran away.’ Soon afterwards, Doan did the same thing.

CCTV footage shows both women heading separately towards the bathroom, waving their hands around slightly as if not wanting to touch anything. It is not clear if they’d been specifically told to wash their hands, but Doan later said she didn’t want to stain her LOL sweatshirt.

There is a theory that what was applied to Kim Jong-nam’s face was a modified version of the nerve agent VX, which had been split into separate compounds and only became effective when both were mixed together. ‘This was brought up in the trial as a possibility by the defence counsels as well as a toxicologist,’ says Hadi Azmi, a Malaysian journalist who covered the case from the beginning and who appears in the film, ‘which was thought to be why Siti and Doan survived the exposure to the chemical without suffering the same fate as Kim Jong-nam. I’ve read reports that say it’s possible to create two substances that only become VX once exposed to one another, but it was not entirely proven in this case since there was no sample of the chemical both women were given by the North Koreans, though traces were found on their clothes, in a decayed state.

‘That’s why Ri Jong Chol is an interesting character in this whole business. He is a chemist by trade, and was thought to be in the country at the behest of the Pyongyang government, being supplied a house and money. His house was raided but cops were not open about anything they might have found there.’ He was initially suspected of involvement in cooking up the VX, but the investigation was dropped owing to lack of evidence and he was deported.

After the attack, Siti left the airport and went back to her job at the Flamingo Hotel, where she was soon arrested. Doan returned to the airport the following day; she had arranged to meet Mr Chang for another prank, but he didn’t show up and his phone number was no longer in use. When she tried to get a taxi, she was arrested.

The Motive

What was the motive for such an ambitious hit? Kim Jong-un has form, and a taste for ruthless executions. He had his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, executed by firing squad, and his defence minister was reportedly killed by anti-aircraft gun after dozing off during a military rally attended by the leader. ‘Before this, the normal MO for North Korean assassinations abroad was to do it very quietly in dark alleys,’ says White. ‘Not something caught on camera – so public and brazen and orchestrated. So you have to wonder whether Kim Jong-un was really out to humiliate his brother in a very darkly comic way.’

Kim Jong-nam was his half-brother, the first son of Kim Jong-il who ruled North Korea from 1994 to 2011, and had originally been expected to succeed their father – but had fallen out of favour after he was caught using a fake passport to take his young family to Disneyland in Tokyo in 2001. (He had developed degenerate tastes after being educated at boarding school in the West.) Kim Jong-un became the Supreme Leader in 2011, on the death of his father.

Though Kim Jong-nam lived in exile in Macau, his movements were monitored by the regime, and there had been two previous attempts on his life. He was hardly a threat, but he had publicly denounced the idea of hereditary transfer of power, and, it turned out, there was speculation that he had been informing the CIA (more than $100,000 in cash was found in his bag after he died, and there was evidence that he had met with a CIA agent and information had been downloaded from his computer).

With all this in mind, the film-makers had the highest levels of cybersecurity, in consultation with the FBI. ‘And I’ve never had to deal with anything like that in my films – where the subject matter has proved they can attack the highest echelons of government,’ says White. ‘I don’t want to be melodramatic but I felt afraid the entire time I was making it. And you start to wonder how much of that fear is valid and how much is paranoia. Being paranoid in that murky purgatory space for two years was not a nice place to be, so we’re very happy to have the film out in the world. I felt like I was living in a spy movie.’

For their part, Siti and Doan knew nothing about Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong-nam. But both had prestigious lawyers assigned to them by their governments, who amassed a considerable amount of evidence in their defence – for example, thousands of text messages with nothing to indicate the women had any knowledge of an assassination.

The Trial

Still, when the trial began in October 2017, things did not look good. The prosecution were not interested in pursuing those who they referred to as ‘the four other suspects’ who had ‘trained’ the women-they were not even named in court.

If Siti and Doan were found guilty, White says, ‘Our plan was to release the film right after they were convicted but before they were put to death, to try to start an international outcry, to use our film to prove their innocence, since it wasn’t coming out in the courtroom.’

For the director, this dilemma was the most challenging part of the whole project. ‘How do you ethically put a film out where you are proving these women’s innocence but the likely ending is that they’re going to be executed? I’ve made some very heavy films [he directed the acclaimed Netflix series The Keepers, focusing on the murder of a nun in Baltimore, and the covering up of abuse in the Catholic Church] but not where the people involved were facing life or death.’

‘It was definitely an uphill battle,’ says Hargrave. ‘The longer we were making the film, the more we became convinced of their innocence, and the more likely it seemed that they were going to die.

‘We did not anticipate what happened at all. That was a total shock to us.’

What happened was this. Once the prosecution case had been presented, the judge had the option to either acquit the women or hear their defence. His comments indicated that he already thought they were guilty. In an 82-page judgement, he said, ‘To me, the precise timing and use of VX as a chemical weapon all goes to support that they knew that the liquid placed on their hands were toxic substances.’

But everyone who met Siti and Doan was struck by their naivety and lack of guile, Siti’s lawyer in particular.

Speculation over the women’s guilt reached fever pitch. White was not allowed to film in the courtroom, but it was filled with journalists. After the judgment, Hadi Azmi wrote, ‘They are f—ed,’ in his notebook.

‘These girls are going to hang,’ he thought.

‘He’s a well-respected judge,’ says White. ‘But I think there’s definitely a political part, as in, this was such a humiliating international embarrassment for Malaysia to have this happen on their soil. They can’t let anybody get away with a political assassination in their international airport. Someone needs to be held accountable.’

The trial was set to resume in early 2019 and the defence prepared to put forward their side of the story. The film-makers had been tipped off that something big was going to happen, but they had no idea what. They thought perhaps the mysterious ‘James’ had materialised. Instead, the prosecutor requested that the charges against Siti Aisyah be withdrawn.

No reasons were given and Siti, overcome with emotion, was released and shortly after flew back to Jakarta. It turned out that the Malaysian government had come under pressure from the Indonesian government.

At this point the women had been in jail for two years, and had become friends; they were held in separate but neighbouring cells. At first Siti had been too ashamed to contact her family, but she confided in Doan, who said, ‘We became like sisters.’ After her friend was acquitted, Doan was traumatised and alone. An adjournment was requested.

In the end, the defence never got to present their evidence. But the film does that instead. In April, Doan’s murder charge was dropped, in favour of the lesser charge of ‘causing harm’, to which she pleaded guilty. (Vietnam has close relations with North Korea, and the Vietnamese government had perhaps been more reticent to pressurise the Malaysian government.) She was released on 3 May, 2019.

White met Doan for the first time on the flight home. ‘Her lawyers were flying back to Vietnam with her. And they tipped us off. The Vietnamese government had booked the whole back 10 rows of the plane to protect her from the press.’ The film shows her arriving at the airport – sunglasses, lipstick, paparazzi. What are you going to do now? she is asked. ‘I think I’d like to perform,’ she says. ‘Like an actress.’

She only found out about Kim Jong-nam and Kim Jong-un when she got back to Vietnam. ‘It’s only now that I really understand. I never imagined I could be involved in his murder,’ she said. ‘I feel really sorry for him.’ Doan is now back in her village with her family. ‘They are trying to return to their normal lives,’ says Hargrave, ‘but their perspectives on life are forever altered.’

The suspects are still at large, though on Interpol’s wanted list. Not long after the attack, the chemist, Ri Jong Chol, was spotted doing karaoke in China. There has been no justice for the victim, and no discernible consequences for Kim Jong-un’s regime.

The women are still in touch. After Siti was released, she said, ‘I am so happy to be at home with my family and friends but I am still sad. It’s as if those North Koreans saw me as if my life has no value whatsoever, like I am a nobody. A nothing.’

Assassins is available on Dogwoof On Demand and other digital platforms from Friday; watch.dogwoof.com