The estranged older brother of North Korea's leader died less than 20 minutes after being poisoned by a nerve agent, the official postmortem report concluded.
S. Subramaniam, Malaysia's health minister, said the autopsy concluded that Kim Jong-un's brother Kim Jong-nam died due to a large amount of the VX nerve agent in his body.
"The amount of the VX was so high that it affected his heart and lungs. The absorption was very rapid, and that resulted in him being killed in 15 to 20 minutes" after exposure, he told reporters in the capital Kuala Lumpur today.
Subramaniam said the ministry is still awaiting Jong-nam's blood relatives to arrive in Malaysia for tests to verify his identity.
He added that if no next-of-kin is available, other methods will be used to confirm the identity, such as dental profiling and photo comparisons where identifications can be made via marks such as moles.
Subramaniam also said the postmortem, excluding the verification process, has been completed and would be handed over to the Malaysian police for further investigation.
Jong-nam was killed on Feb. 13 at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport by two female assassins using the VX nerve agent, classified by the UN as a weapon of mass destruction.
Separately, Deputy Health Minister Hilmi Yahaya told the media that the VX found in Jong-nam's body has never before been seen in Malaysia's recorded history.
He said the VX -- a chemical weapon that can paralyze the nervous system and kill by suffocation within a half-hour -- was difficult for immigration or customs officers to detect in small amounts.
