JAKARTA, Indonesia—Family and former neighbors of the Indonesian woman suspected of involvement in the audacious killing of the North Korean leader’s half brother in Malaysia are stunned by the arrest of the young mother who they say was a polite and quiet “nice girl.”
Siti Aisyah, 25, is one of three people arrested so far by Malaysian police for possible involvement in the apparent assassination of Kim Jong Nam.
Between 2008 and 2011 she and her then-husband lived in a modest dwelling with flaking red paint in a narrow alley of the densely populated Tambora neighborhood in western Jakarta.
Her former father-in-law Tjia Liang Kiong, who lives in a nearby middle-class neighborhood and last saw Aisyah on Jan. 28, described her as a “very kind, polite and respectful person.”
“I was shocked to hear that she was arrested for murdering someone,” he said. “I don’t believe that she would commit such a crime or what the media says—that she is an intelligence agent.”
The three suspects—Aisyah, a woman carrying a Vietnamese passport and a man said to be Aisyah’s Malaysian boyfriend—were arrested separately Wednesday and Thursday.
The women were identified using surveillance videos from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, where Kim Jong Nam suddenly fell ill Monday morning. Malaysian officials said he died on the way to a hospital after telling medical workers at the airport that he had been sprayed with a chemical.
