NORTH KOREAN SIBLING RIVALRY: WHEN A BROTHER KILLS HIS BROTHER?

ICHEOKU says it will not be the first time neither will it be the last time that sibling rivalry has forced the drawing of blood of a brother by another brother. In Genesis 4:8 Cain killed his brother Abel and went on to retort that he is not his brother's keeper. Genesis 27:35-41 told the story of Esau and Jacob and how their mother helped engineer another sibling rivalry between her two sons. In Nepal, a brother murdered his brother King and his family, covetous of the kingdom which led to the abolition of the monarchy in Nepal. 

So if the current suspicion that the leader of the reclusive North Korea Kim Jong Un ordered the hit on his brother, Kim Jong Nam, it goes without saying that sibling rivalry is still very much a fact of life and has not gone away.

Kim Jong Nam, 45, was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport Malaysia by two female secret agents from North Korea's Spy agency Reconnaissance General Bureau, wielding poisoned handkerchief and poisoned needles. They struck following a security lapse between his bodyguards and Malaysian airport police at the airport. Kim Jo Nam was an out of wedlock child of the former leader of North Korea, their father, Kim Jong II and his South Korea mistress, Sung Hae-rim. 

The circumstance of his birth possibly explains why he was passed over by their late father in choosing his heir to the throne in Pyongyang; admitted some analysts would like the world to believe that it was his disgraceful conduct, caught traveling with a false passport in Japan in 2001 that did him in and cost him the throne. However, masking his anger at being passed over, he once said that he is not personally interested in being a leader of North Korea and urged his younger brother leader to do his best for the sake of North Koreans prosperous lives. 

But his luck ran out and not even his false identity, traveling under an assumed name Kin Choi when he was hit, could protect him. An advocate of political reform in the reclusive North Korean, was probably considered a threat which must be eliminated and he was in fact eliminated. Kim Jong Nam was previously targeted for a hit and run accident but the plot was preempted when the agent assigned to stage it was arrested in South Korea. But in Malaysia, a porous security did the trick; his luck exhausted and not being the cat with the proverbial nine lives, they got him. May his soul rest.