Assassination offers yet another reminder of Kim Jong-un’s brutal tactics

The reported murder of the half-brother of Kim Jong-un by two female secret agents fits well into the unreal, comic book depiction of North Korea as bizarre hermit kingdom ruled by a murderous, whimsical, paranoid and overweight tyrant addicted to chocolate and cocaine. But Kim’s dictatorship is no joke.

Ever fearful of plots to overthrow him, Kim is said to have had 140 senior officials executed since he succeeded his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011. In a Kafka-esque twist, the most recent victim of regime purges was the man in charge of them: General Kim Won-hong, chief of the secret police and minister of state security, who was defenestrated last month.

Flame-throwers and machine-guns are said to be Kim’s favoured methods of execution. But the method allegedly used to assassinate his troublesome playboy half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday recalls a similar incident in South Korea in 2011, when a North Korean agent attacked an anti-regime activist with a poisoned needle concealed in a pen.

Gruesome stories of the fate of relatives and senior advisers who have fallen out of favour, none officially corroborated, are complemented by persistent rumours of Kim’s unstable mental state. Aged about 34, he is reportedly chronically overweight and suffering from diabetes.

But there is another, more confident and competent aspect to Kim’s one-man reign, and it is this more serious side that has western analysts worried. In recent months, Kim has declared North Korea possesses an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting Los Angeles and pledged more nuclear detonations after last year’s two atomic tests.

And he virtually gatecrashed Donald Trump’s cosy Palm Beach golfing weekend with Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, by firing a new type of ballistic missile over the Sea of Japan. It was a provocation exactly timed to put both men off their swing.