Kim Jong Nam, the elder half-brother of North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un, met with an American man five days before he was murdered, a court in Malaysia heard Monday.
The meeting took place in an apartment in Langkawi, capital of a group of Malaysian holiday islands. It was confirmed to the court in Kuala Lumpur by investigating officer Wan Azirul Nizam Che Wan Aziz, according to the state-run Bernama news agency.
He was responding to a question from the defense attorneys of two women charged with smearing a deadly nerve agent, VX, on Kim's face as he passed through a busy Kuala Lumpur airport in February last year.
The question was based on an article in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun, which reported the meeting in Langkawi last May. Asahi Shimbun reported that the US national was a Korean-American intelligence agent.
The investigating officer agreed that "there was a meeting between Kim Chol (Kim Jong Nam) and an American man, but the police had not been able to ascertain the man's identity and whether or not he was a spy," Bernama reported.
He also confirmed the meeting was in Langkawi on February 9, 2017.
Two women, Siti Aisyah, 25, and Indonesian and Doan Thi Huong, 29, from Vietnam, are accused of conspiring with four unnamed Koreans to murder Kim.
Both pleaded not guilty to murder charges when their trial began last October.
Asahi Shimbun's investigation included evidence from a police computer forensics report showing that a laptop owned by Kim was last used on February 9, the day of the Langkawi meeting, and that a USB stick-drive had been connected to it that day.
Last December the court heard how Kim had an antidote to VX in the backpack he was wearing when he was attacked and killed.