Forged Brazilian passports for Kim Jong-Il and Jong-Un discovered - Sensationalist Headlines

[URL]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43242596[/URL] [QUOTE]Fresh evidence emerged this week that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and his father and predecessor Kim Jong-il, obtained fraudulent Brazilian passports in the 1990s. [B]Reuters obtained photocopies of the documents, in which a young Kim Jong-un is presented as "Josef Pwag" (son of Ricardo and Marcela) and his father as "Ijong Tchoi".[/B] A Brazilian security source told the news agency that the documents - which were issued by the Brazilian embassy in the Czech capital, Prague in 1996 - appeared to be genuine. In 2011, Japanese media quoted officials as saying Kim Jong-un and his brother Jong-chul had entered the country to visit Tokyo Disneyland on Brazilian documents as far back as 1991. Jong-un's older half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, is said to have fallen out of favour with their father in 2001 after he was caught trying to sneak into Japan using a false Dominican passport - apparently also on his way to Disneyland. Obtaining passports fraudulently doesn't seem to have been much of a problem for the Kims. Nonetheless, Dr John Nilsson-Wright, North Korea expert at UK security think-tank Chatham House, does find it surprising that Kim Jong-il - then only two years into his leadership - would have considered travelling abroad under a false passport. "Why would he want to do that? Kim Jong-il was seen as being very risk-averse - we know that he had visited Moscow and Beijing on a number of occasions, but for that he probably wouldn't have needed a passport," Dr Nilsson-Wright told the BBC's Newshour programme. [B]"So it suggests that maybe this was an attempt by him and his son to think in terms of potentially an escape route out of North Korea - and that would be revealing and very surprising."[/B] It suggests, he says, [B]"that there was a degree of uncertainty - that the country was less secure than we might have thought". [/B] That's quite a common conception - that because of Brazil's diverse population, [URL="https://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/americas/2011/12/92681.html"]almost anyone on the planet could plausibly claim to be Brazilian[/URL] and the passports are thus in high demand. A Brazilian official made such a claim to an al-Jazeera journalist in 2011. In fact, there isn't much data to suggest this assertion is currently valid. Back in the 1990s, though, it was a different story. The Brazilian government itself concedes that before it introduced a raft of security features in 2006, [URL="https://intra.serpro.gov.br/tema/editoria-infograficos/a-evolucao-do-passaporte-brasileiro"]the "Brazilian passport was one of the most commonly faked"[/URL]. The Kims could also easily pass as part of Brazil's large populations of East Asian origin. It's also interesting to note that the passport was issued in Brazil's embassy in the Czech Republic. Links - both economic and co-operative - were forged between North Korea and the then-Czechoslovakia during the period of frantic growth and rebuilding in North Korea following the devastating 1950-53 Korean War.[/QUOTE]

Were they already looking for a way to flee?

Always have a way out just in case anything happens, considering what happened to Saddam and Gaddafi, it would be convinient to have an insurance plan. Still, a brazillian passport makes very funny sense if you considers who else fled to a south american country tho.

Didn't Kim Jong-un spend most of his youth in Switzerland? And his brother put into exile for illegally visiting Japan? I can't help but think that the passports were [I]perhaps[/I] something along the lines of a cover to visit places rather than necessarily escape from the country. Although I could be very naive in this assumption, just taking into account the amount the Kims seemed to enjoy travel.

[QUOTE=Native Hunter;53188265]Didn't Kim Jong-un spend most of his youth in Switzerland? And his brother put into exile for illegally visiting Japan? I can't help but think that the passports were [I]perhaps[/I] something along the lines of a cover to visit places rather than necessarily escape from the country. Although I could be very naive in this assumption, just taking into account the amount the Kims seemed to enjoy travel.[/QUOTE] Yeah I think Jong-Un went to a Swiss college, and played a lot of basketball there. Is there any record of Jong-Il traveling before becoming dictator of NK? He was born in the USSR and Wikipedia says he occasionally went to Malta for English lessons.

[QUOTE=alexglitch;53188214]Always have a way out just in case anything happens, considering what happened to Saddam and Gaddafi, it would be convinient to have an insurance plan. Still, a brazillian passport makes very funny sense if you considers who else fled to a south american country tho.[/QUOTE] They're going to the same hideaway home as Hitler did.

Considering the CIA was [URL="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adolf-hitler-escape-nazi-germany-rumor-cia-documents-jfk-assassination/"]mostly convinced Hitler escaped to Colombia[/URL] it's a bit of distance :v:

[QUOTE=Omali;53188375]They're going to the same hideaway home as Hitler did.[/QUOTE] Some hastily dug grave somewhere around Berlin?

I've said it before but I'll say it again: The biggest fear Kim has isn't America or South Korea invading. It's not China abandoning him. The biggest threat is and always has been internal revolt. Dictatorships are inherently unstable. You can keep the ruling class in line by tying their fate to yours, and the peasants become a threat to you both. Or you can keep the peasants in line with handouts, in which case any high-level minister or general might try to bump you off and take your place - or you might run out of handouts, either due to bad luck or bad governance. I don't even think North Korea has nukes aimed at us, or at least not all of them. I think many of their nukes are aimed at their own country, a last-ditch weapon to quell a revolution. Because that's what might be needed to stop a large-scale mutiny. Given all that, of [I]course[/I] they have fake passports. Flee to South America after it all goes to shit - it worked for a couple Nazis, it can work for a couple Kims.

[QUOTE=Quark:;53188479]Considering the CIA was [URL="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adolf-hitler-escape-nazi-germany-rumor-cia-documents-jfk-assassination/"]mostly convinced Hitler escaped to Colombia[/URL] it's a bit of distance :v:[/QUOTE] That's not what that document is. The CIA document was a single former SS officer claiming he escaped and a picture of a man with a Hitler mustache, the CIA investigated it shortly. He didn't actually escape. Israeli Commandos will ram a tank through the house of a 114 year old Czech man who walked past a concentration camp, Hitler wouldn't have escaped.