Mr. Kim died en route to a hospital minutes after the Feb. 13 encounter at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

Image Siti Aisyah Credit... Royal Malaysia Police, via European Pressphoto Agency

The women accused of killing him — Siti Aisyah, 25, of Indonesia, and Doan Thi Huong, 28, of Vietnam — said that they had no idea who the victim was or that he had died until after they were arrested. Their lawyers have argued that they are scapegoats and that the true culprits were North Korean agents who directed the women and provided the banned chemical weapon they used, VX nerve agent.

They could face the death penalty. Outside Kuala Lumpur in Shah Alam on Monday, their lawyers asked the court to allow the identities of four people suspected of being North Korean agents to be revealed.

North Korea has denied involvement in the killing and argued that Mr. Kim died of a heart attack. Mr. Kim, 45, was the eldest son of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, and had once been seen as the most likely person to replace him in the country’s hereditary dictatorship.

But Kim Jong-nam seemed to take little interest in the more brutal aspects of running a dictatorship and fell out of his father’s favor when he was caught trying to enter Japan with a fake Dominican Republic passport in 2001. He told Japanese officials that he wanted to take his family to Tokyo Disneyland.