Factbox: No strangers to “wet jobs”: Suspected killings overseas by North Korean agents

Here is a list of some such cases:

– 1968 – Suspected North Korean commandos, dressed in South Korean military uniform, attempted to assassinate then South Korean President Park Chung-hee. They were stopped by police 800 meters (yards) from the presidential Blue House. Only two escaped, the rest were killed.

– 1974 – A man believed to be a North Korean agent shot at Park when he was delivering a speech at an Independence Day ceremony. The bullets missed him but killed his wife.

– 1983 – A bomb exploded at a memorial in Myanmar, then Burma, when South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan and several members of his cabinet were visiting. The South’s foreign minister and 20 other people were killed. One of the bombers confessed to being a North Korean military officer.

– 1987 – Two suspected North Korean agents planted a bomb in a South Korean airliner flying from Baghdad to Seoul. The bomb exploded after the pair disembarked at a stopover in Abu Dhabi. All 104 passengers and 11 crew, mostly South Koreans, were killed.

– 1997 – Lee Han-young, a North Korean defector, was shot and killed in South Korea by two assailants who were never caught but were suspected to be North Korean agents. Lee was the cousin of Kim Jong Nam, who was killed in Kuala Lumpur on Monday.

– 2010 – South Korean authorities arrested two North Korean operatives who it said were on a mission to assassinate Hwang Jang-yop, a defector and a former North Korean Workers’ Party secretary.

– 2011 – A North Korean agent was jailed in the South for attempting to assassinate Park Sang-hak, a defector from the North, with a poison-tipped needle.

(Compiled by Ju-min Park and Raju Gopalakrishnan- Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)