North Korea and Malaysia on Monday exchanged barbs over the investigation into the killing of leader Kim Jong-Un’s brother, as footage emerged of the moment he was fatally attacked in Kuala Lumpur airport.

Malaysia’s probe has put five North Koreans in the frame for the airport assassination of Kim Jong-Nam, but Pyongyang said it had no faith in the investigation and claimed Kuala Lumpur was in cahoots with “hostile forces”.

The diplomatic confrontation gathered pace Monday when Malaysia recalled its envoy to North Korea and summoned Pyongyang’s ambassador Kang Chol for a dressing down.

But an unbowed Kang hit back.

“It has been seven days since the incident, but there is no clear evidence on the cause of death and at the moment we cannot trust the investigation by the Malaysian police”, he told reporters in the Malaysian capital.

Pyongyang has also criticised Malaysia for carrying out a post-mortem examination without North Korean permission – a complaint Kuala Lumpur said was groundless.

Read also: We cannot trust Malaysian investigation: N Korea

“The ministry emphasised that as the death occurred on Malaysian soil under mysterious circumstances, it is the responsibility of the Malaysian government to conduct an investigation to identify the cause of death,” the foreign ministry said.

“The Malaysian government takes very seriously any unfounded attempt to tarnish its reputation. The Malaysian Government views the criticism… as baseless”.

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak backed those running the probe, saying it would be “very professional”.

“I have absolute confidence that they are very objective in whatever they do,” he said in his first comments since news of the killing broke.

“We have no reason why we want to do something that would paint the North Koreans in a bad light. But we would be objective and we expect them to understand that we apply the rule of law in Malaysia.” .

CCTV footage aired on Japanese television on Monday gave the first public glimpse of the apparent moment Jong-Nam was attacked at Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

The dramatic film shows two women approaching a portly man – identified as Jong-Nam – with one of them grabbing him from behind and appearing to push a cloth in his face.

The man is then seen talking to airport staff and apparently explaining to them what had happened, gesturing to his head.

The staff then lead him to the airport clinic.

Photographs showing a man slumped in a chair at the clinic, consistent with the CCTV images of the attack, were published in the Malaysian press over the weekend.

Seoul has pointed the finger of blame at Pyongyang for the attack last Monday, citing a “standing order” from the leader to kill his elder sibling and a failed assassination bid in 2012 after he criticised the regime.

The claim was bolstered over the weekend, with Malaysian police saying they believed five North Koreans were involved in the killing.

One of them was already in custody, and four are believed to have fled the country on the day of the murder.

Detectives are also holding an Indonesian woman and her Malaysian boyfriend, as well as a Vietnamese woman.

Three other North Koreans were wanted for questioning, police said.

At least three of the wanted North Koreans took a flight from Jakarta to Dubai on the evening of the murder, an Indonesian immigration official said.

They had travelled from Malaysia to Jakarta and after Dubai returned to Pyongyang via Russia, Malaysian media quoted official sources as saying.

South Korea’s Unification Minister Hong Yong-Pyo said Monday it was becoming even more clear that the North Korean government was behind the killing of Kim Jong-Nam.

“The Malaysian government is prudently investigating the case and we think it’s significant that it officially announced North Korean suspects were involved,” Hong told reporters.

Kim Jong-Nam was once thought to be the natural successor to his father, the then-North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il.

But after Jong-Il’s death in 2011 the succession went instead to his younger son Kim Jong-Un.

Reports of purges and executions have emerged from the current regime as Jong-Un tries to strengthen his grip on power in the face of international pressure over his nuclear and missile programmes.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte ran a death squad that killed many people, including a journalist and a pregnant woman, when he was mayor of a southern city, a retired policeman who claimed to part of the group said Monday.

Arthur Lascanas, sitting alongside three prominent human rights lawyers, broke down in tears as he listed a series of murders in Davao city that he alleged Duterte ordered either to eliminate critics or fight crime.

Lascanas said he even killed his two brothers, who were involved in drug trafficking, due to “blind loyalty” to Duterte as well as cash rewards.

“Whether we buried them (bodies) or dumped them at sea, we were always paid by Mayor Rody Duterte,” Lascanas said.

Duterte has been repeatedly accused of running death squads during his more than two decades as Davao mayor, and expanding on those tactics as president in waging a war on drugs that has claimed thousands of lives.

Duterte has over the years variously denied and confirmed the existence of a Davao death squad, and claimed to have personally killed people to set an example for police.

However presidential spokesman Martin Anadanar on Monday rejected all of Lascanas’s claims.

“The press conference of self-confessed hitman Arthur Lascanas is part of a protracted political drama aimed to destroy the president and to topple his administration,” Andanar said in a statement.

In one of the most chilling accounts, Lascanas said he and other policemen abducted a suspected kidnapper but also took his seven-month pregnant wife, his four or five-year-old son, his son-in-law and two house helpers.

“Mayor Rody Duterte gave us the signal: “go ahead, clean them up,” he said.

“In this case, evil prevailed. They killed the entire family in front of me, using a calibre .22 with silencer.” He said Duterte also paid him and other policemen three million pesos ($60,000) for killing in 2003 prominent radio broadcaster Jun Pala, a critic of the then-mayor

A self-confessed hitman last year told a Senate inquiry that Lascanas was a leader of the Davao death squad that killed more than 1,000 people.

Lascanas, when he was still a policeman, initially denied to the Senate inquiry that he was involved.

But, after retiring from the police force in December, Lascanas said his conscience dictated he should now tell the truth and confess to being part of the death squads.

Duterte, 71, won presidential elections last year after promising during the campaign to eradicate drugs in society by killing tens of thousands of people.

He immediately launched the drug war after taking office on June 30, and more than 6,500 people have died in the crackdown in what Amnesty International has said may amount to crimes against humanity.

South Korea’s Lotte Group will face severe consequences if it allows the South Korean government to deploy a US anti-missile system on land that now forms part of a golf course it owns, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency has warned.

The comments come soon after Lotte said this month that Chinese authorities had halted work at a multi-billion-dollar real estate project following a fire inspection, amid South Korea’s worries that Beijing is retaliating for its plans to host the system.

China has repeatedly expressed opposition to South Korea’s planned deployment later this year of the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system, which Seoul and Washington say is needed to defend against North Korea.

China worries the system’s powerful radar can penetrate its territory.

THAAD is a threat to regional security and stability, Xinhua said in an English-language commentary, adding that Lotte was”one decision away from becoming an accessory to the act”.

If Lotte, South Korea’s fifth-largest conglomerate, agrees to the deal, the South Korean and the US governments will hasten the planned deployment, Xinhua said late Sunday afternoon. “By association, Lotte will hurt the Chinese people and the consequences could be severe,” it added.

“The Chinese people will not support a company complicit in damaging China’s interests.” Such commentaries are not government statements, but can be read as a reflection of official thinking.

Lotte should defer or reject the deal, forcing the South Korean government to review the feasibility of the deployment, Xinhua added. “One misjudged step could have severe consequences.” Beijing is widely believed in South Korea to be discriminating against some of its companies and cancelling performances by Korean artists without explanation.

China understands South Korea’s need to protect its security but Seoul still needs to respect Beijing’s concerns about the deployment of THAAD, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi told his South Korean counterpart over the weekend.

North Korea’s most recent test firing of a ballistic missile on Feb. 12 drew condemnation from the United States, South Korea and Japan, which urged an “even stronger” international response to Pyongyang’s violations of UN resolutions.

A senior member of the personal security retinue of Thailand’s new king has been fired and stripped of his titles, the palace has announced, the latest royal official to publicly fall from grace.

Air Vice Marshal Chitpong Thongkum was accused of improperly using his connections to King Maha Vajiralongkorn in a statement published in the Royal Gazette on Sunday.

“His army rank has been withdrawn and his royal decorations have been rescinded,” the statement said, adding that he had “behaved in a way that brought about distrust and caused severe damage to the royal family”.

Thailand’s enormously wealthy royal family is an opaque institution that releases little information.

It is also shielded by a draconian defamation law that makes scrutiny of its inner workings, or debate over its role, almost impossible inside the kingdom.

Media inside Thailand must heavily self-censor when reporting on the royal family.

Vajiralongkorn took the throne following the October death of his widely revered father King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who reigned for seven decades.

He has yet to attain his father’s massive popularity and earlier spent much of his time outside the kingdom.

Chitpong is the latest in a string of people close to Vajiralongkorn to have been publicly stripped of their titles or seen legal cases brought against them.

Last week police announced that one of the palace’s most senior officials, Grand Chamberlain Jumpol Manmai, was being investigated for allegedly building a property on parkland.

Jumpol was a former deputy national police chief before he rose up through the palace ranks.

Other close aides and even family members have been purged under the charge of improperly claiming connections to the king to make money.

In 2015 three people – including a celebrity soothsayer – were arrested under the lese majeste law over such allegations.

The soothsayer and one other suspect died in military custody soon after their arrests.

The year before Vajiralongkorn announced that his then wife Princess Srirasmi Suwadee, with whom he has a son, had been stripped of her titles.

That move came after half a dozen members of Srirasmi’s family were arrested and later jailed on lese majeste charges for allegedly improperly using their connections to him.

Since Srirasmi’s fall, Vajiralongkorn has been seen in the presence of a member of his personal security retinue who has been given the official name of Suthida Vajiralongkorn na Ayudhya.

She was made a general the day Vajiralongkorn took the throne.

PETALING JAYA – The brazen assassination of Kim Jong-nam in Malaysia was a warning to North Korean elites thinking of defecting from the country via Malaysia, claims an academic.

“This shows to the elites that if they want to defect … that North Korea maintains an intelligence presence in Malaysia. They are watching who’s coming in and who’s leaving the country,” said Go Myong-hyun (pic), a research fellow from the Seoul-based Asan Institute for policy studies, in a discussion on Arirang TV, an international English-language South Korean network.

“So that means if the North Korean state wants to go after possible defectors who want to transit through Malaysia, there is high risk for them to use Malaysia as a transit point,” he said, adding that this was a personal viewpoint.

More than 28,000 people are said to have defected from North Korea to South Korea from 1988 to 2015 for various reasons.

However, it is unknown if any North Koreans defected to South Korea via Malaysia.

Read also: Kim Jong-nam’s son Han-sol arriving in KL

Before Kim’s assassination, Malaysia had seemingly good relations with North Korea and Malaysians were able to visit the country without a visa.

Go added that the assassination could have been carried out in Malaysia because it carried the least political risk compared to either Macau, China or Singapore – places where Kim was previously seen.

He said that Macau was out of the question as it is a part of China and if North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un was indeed behind the murder, he wouldn’t want to create unnecessary conflict with China.

Read also: Murder masterminds back in Pyongyang

Go also said that North Korea would not want to jeopardise their relationship with Singapore as it is an important regional hub for their overseas economic network.

“Malaysia, in a way, is the least risky place to carry out the operation,” he said.

Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of leader Kim Jong-un, died shortly after an unidentified liquid was sprayed in his face at KLIA2 on Feb 13.

Four suspects, including the two women who allegedly carried out the killing, have since been detained in connection with the case.