AP News, February 1st, 2007
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's eldest son has lived for the past three years in Macau, where the United States slapped sanctions on a bank for allegedly helping Pyongyang launder money, a news report said Thursday.
Kim Jong Nam, 35, has stayed in five-star hotels in the Chinese territory and has been seen in casinos and restaurants, the South China Morning Post reported, quoting unidentified sources from a six-week investigation.
The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun published a similar report on Wednesday with a photo that allegedly showed the pudgy younger Kim outside a building in Macau.
Macau's Government Information Bureau refused to discuss the report. South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, and the top spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, said they could not confirm the report with independent sources.
A person in Hong Kong's diplomatic community, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, told the AP that the younger Kim occasionally visits Macau, but could not confirm that Kim Jong Nam lived in the city.
Highly secretive North Korea rarely releases details about Kim Jong Il and his family. But the leader is known to have three sons. Some believe Jong Nam has fallen out of favor after embarrassing his father in 2001, when he was caught trying to enter Japan on a fake passport, saying he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland.
North Korea has long had close ties to Macau, a former Portuguese enclave that is trying to shed its reputation for being a seedy casino city plagued by gang violence.
The United States has alleged that a Macau bank, Banco Delta Asia SARL, helped North Korea in money laundering and counterfeiting activities. Washington imposed financial sanctions on the bank in 2005, prompting North Korea to begin boycotting discussions to disarm its nuclear program. The talks were recently restarted.
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Associated Press writer Kwang-Tae Kim in Seoul contributed to this report.
