North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and his late father, Kim Jong Il, used fraudulently obtained Brazilian passports to apply for visas to visit Western countries in the 1990s, five senior Western European security sources told Reuters.
While North Korea's ruling family is known to have used travel documents obtained under false pretenses, there are few specific examples. The photocopies of the Brazilian passports seen by Reuters have not been published before.
"They used these Brazilian passports, which clearly show the photographs of Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il, to attempt to obtain visas from foreign embassies," one senior Western security source said on condition of anonymity. "This shows the desire for travel and points to the ruling family's attempts to build a possible escape route."