Woman Convicted of Killing Kim Jong-un’s Half Brother Is Freed

BANGKOK — A Vietnamese woman who was the only person convicted in the bold assassination of Kim Jong-un’s elder half brother, Kim Jong-nam, was released Friday after serving 27 months in a Malaysian prison.

The release of Doan Thi Huong, 30, brings an end to the legal case in the murder of Mr. Kim, who died in February 2017 after two women smeared VX nerve agent on his face at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The use of a severely toxic military weapon in such a very public assassination was highly unusual.

An Indonesian woman arrested in the case, Siti Aisyah, 27, was released in March after high-level appeals by the Indonesian government to free her.

The police have identified at least seven North Koreans suspected of involvement in the killing, but none of them were ever brought to trial. Four escaped Malaysia immediately after the attack, and three others were allowed to leave after Pyongyang blocked Malaysian diplomats from leaving North Korea.

The North Korean government denied any involvement in the attack, but the country’s ruler, Kim Jong-un, was widely believed to have ordered the killing. Kim Jong-nam, who was never fully accepted by the ruling family in North Korea, lived much of his life wandering abroad, in Europe and Asia.

After Ms. Siti’s release, Ms. Huong was allowed to plead guilty to a charge of causing bodily harm and sentenced to 40 months in prison. She received a standard sentence reduction and credit for time served while awaiting trial.

Ms. Huong’s lawyer, Hisham Teh, said she was released from prison in the morning and would fly to Hanoi in the evening.

The two women, who did not know each other before the attack, said they had no intention of killing Mr. Kim and had been tricked by North Korean agents into thinking that they were participating in a harmless prank for a television reality show.

Mr. Hisham described Ms. Huong as “naïve and gullible.”

In accepting her plea to a lesser offense, the judge in the case, Azmi Ariffin, told Ms. Huong that she was “a very lucky person.” She had faced the death penalty if convicted of Mr. Kim’s murder.