SEOUL: The first sign that Kim Jong Un was potentially on his way to meet US President Donald Trump for a second summit was the…
SEOUL: The first sign that Kim Jong Un was potentially on his way to meet US President Donald Trump for a second summit was the reported appearance of an armoured train in China.
If that train trundles all the way to Hanoi carrying the North Korean leader, it will mean a nearly 4,000-kilometre, 60-hour journey on board for Kim.
He is not long back from his last rail trip. On that occasion, in January, he travelled to Beijing with his entourage in an olive-green train emblazoned with a yellow stripe.
The engine and carriages appeared similar, possibly identical, to the train Kim used the previous year to travel to the Chinese capital for his first overseas visit.
His predecessors, father Kim Jong Il and grandfather Kim Il Sung, also preferred rail for their domestic and overseas travels.
INTERNATIONAL CHILDHOOD, DOMESTIC RULE
Kim Jong Un studied in Switzerland in the 1990s, including at the International School of Berne, along with his brother and sister and is believed to have visited Germany and France during the period.
Unconfirmed South Korean news reports said Jong Un and his brother Jong Chol visited Tokyo Disneyland as children using fake passports to enter Japan in 1991.
Infamously, his eldest brother Jong Nam – assassinated at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport in 2017 in a killing widely blamed on Pyongyang – tried to do the same in 2001, using a Dominican Republic passport, but was stopped at Japanese immigration.
