The secretive visit was confirmed Wednesday by Chinese and North Korean state media which said Kim was treated to a lavish stay in a show of unity after relations were battered by Beijing’s support of UN sanctions against Pyongyang.

Kim had not met China’s President Xi Jinping since taking over after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il, in 2011.

The young leader told Xi that he was ready to hold a summit with South Korean President Moon Jae-in as well as US President Donald Trump, according to China’s Xinhua news agency.

“The issue of denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula can be resolved, if South Korea and the United States respond to our efforts with goodwill, create an atmosphere of peace and stability while taking progressive and synchronous measures for the realisation of peace,” Kim said.

South Korea said last month after talks with Kim in Pyongyang that he would consider abandoning his nuclear weapons in exchange for US security guarantees, and flagged a halt to all missile and nuclear tests while talks were under way.

Analysts said Xi likely wanted to see Kim to ensure North Korea does not cut a deal with Trump that hurts Chinese interests during a summit that is expected to be held in May.

Beijing had appeared sidelined by Pyongyang’s approaches to Seoul and Washington, but Kim’s visit puts China firmly back at the centre of the diplomatic game.

“They don’t want to see a grand deal between the US and North Korea that suddenly makes them great friends,” said Bill Bishop, publisher of the Sinocism China Newsletter.

But Deng Yuwen, an independent Chinese international relations scholar, said that North Korea needed to turn to its old ally ahead of the US summit, as Kim will be sceptical that Trump will guarantee the security of his regime.

“North Korea needs the big brother to protect it at a crucial moment,” Deng told AFP.

And Trump’s decision to draft in hawkish former UN ambassador John Bolton as his new national security advisor last week “will make Kim more vigilant,” Deng said.

Confirmation of the visit ended 24 hours of speculation about the identity of the North Korean visitor after Japanese media spotted a green train, similar to the one used by Kim’s father, arriving in Beijing on Monday and departing the following day.

While Chinese officials refused to confirm Kim’s presence, a heavy police presence at key venues, motorcades driven under police escort, and barricades in the city centre fuelled the belief that Kim had come to pay his respects.

Frayed ties

His visit to China came as a surprise given the state of relations between the Cold War-era allies, which fought together in the 1950-53 Korean War.

China chaired six-party talks on North Korea that collapsed a decade ago, but its call to revive that forum have not been heeded so far and it appeared to be on the margins when South Korea announced that Kim had offered to meet with Moon and Trump.

Frustrated by its neighbour’s nuclear weapons programme and under pressure from Trump, China has backed a raft of UN sanctions, using its economic leverage to squeeze Kim’s regime.

At the same time, Beijing fears the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang and the instability it would bring, potentially sending waves of refugees into China and the possibility of US troops stationed on its border in a unified Korea.

The tensions prompted North Korea’s official news agency to issue a rare critique of China last year, warning of “grave consequences” if Pyongyang’s patience was tested further.

But the Chinese foreign ministry said at the time that Beijing was consistent in its support for “good neighbourly and friendly cooperation” with the North.

In November, Chinese envoy Song Tao became the first senior Chinese official to visit North Korea for more than a year, though he did not meet Kim.

On March 18, the Global Times published a friendlier editorial.

“A severe difference between Beijing and Pyongyang over nuclear issues is a reality, but it should not be the whole picture of ties between the two sides,” the daily wrote.

“North Korea is a respectable country.”

While Kim Jong Un and Moon are due to meet at the border truce village of Panmunjom, the venue for the North Korean leader’s meeting with Trump has yet to be announced.

The Demilitarized Zone that divides the two Koreas is the most plausible locations for the Kim-Trump talks, but Beijing could serve as a more neutral location.

High-level inter-Korean talks are scheduled for Thursday to pave the way for the Moon-Kim meeting, and discussions have also begun for the Trump summit.

The relationship between the North and its key protector China has soured in recent years but at a banquet in Beijing Kim said: “There is no question that my first foreign visit is to the Chinese capital,” KCNA reported.

“This is my solemn duty as someone who should value and continue the DPRK-PRC relations through generations,” he added using the countries’ official acronyms.

    Damian Collins, the chairman of the House of Commons digital, culture and media committee, said that the seriousness of the allegations meant it was “appropriate” for Zuckerberg to offer an explanation himself, whether in person or via videolink.

In a letter published by the committee on Tuesday, a senior British Facebook executive offered to send chief technology office Mike Schroepfer or chief product officer Chris Cox to London next month.

“We’d be very happy to invite Mr Cox to give evidence,” Collins said at the start of a committee hearing on Tuesday.

“However we would still like to hear from Mr Zuckerberg as well.

“We will seek to clarify with Facebook whether he is available to give evidence or not, because that wasn’t clear from our correspondence, and if he is available to give evidence then we would be happy to do that either in person or via video link if that would be more convenient for him.”

In the letter to Collins, Rebecca Stimson, head of public policy for Facebook UK, wrote: “Facebook fully recognizes the level of public and parliamentary interest in these issues and support your belief that these issues must be addressed at the most senior levels of the company by those in an authoritative position to answer your questions.

“As such Mr Zuckerberg has personally asked one of his deputies to make themselves available to give evidence in person to the committee.”

She said either Schroepfer or Cox could attend “straight after the Easter parliamentary recess”, meaning April 16 at the earliest.

The committee’s request to Facebook followed allegations that data from up to 50 million users was harvested by a British company, Cambridge Analytica, for use in election campaigns, namely that of US President Donald Trump in 2016.

The social media giant said it did not know the data was being used in a political campaign, although it did allow an academic researcher to create an app that picked up the information from users and their friends.

In the letter, Stimson revealed that Facebook was working with regulators around the world to assess how many people in each country were affected.

“We can now confirm that around one percent of the global downloads of the app came from users in the EU, including the UK,” she wrote.//AFP

Messages spreading on social media and messaging apps claimed that Clint Lim Way Chau was seen wearing a watch from designer brand Richard Mille, which costs US$89,995 (RM349,000).

The 25-year-old Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology accounting graduate showed his watch to The Star on Tuesday (March 27), which turned out to be a “T-Race” model from Swiss manufacturers Tissot.

A check showed that the watch can be purchased online in Malaysia at a discounted price of RM1,880.

The design and faces of both watches were completely different, with the only similarity being a red wrist strap.

“That is not my watch. How I wish I can have that kind of watch,” he said when met outside the Penang High Court on Tuesday for his father’s corruption trial.

Clad in a green shirt and wearing sunglasses, Clint arrived in the morning and left the courthouse during proceedings to have a drink at a nearby cafe.

Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular briefing in Beijing that she had “no information for the moment. Information will be published in due course.”

Meanwhile a train thought to be carrying a senior North Korean official left Beijing station Tuesday, Japan’s Kyodo News reported, with speculation rife that the North’s leader Kim Jong Un was making a surprise visit.

It was not clear if Kim was aboard, Kyodo added, after the reported arrival Monday from Pyongyang of a special train met in Beijing by an honour guard.//AFP

AA, 23, was arrested by Ngurah Rai Airport customs and excise officers on March 11 upon his arrival at the international airport via Thai AirAsia FD 396 from Bangkok. AA was arrested along with his two Indonesian friends, S, 24, and AP, 25, who also brought drugs into Bali.

AA, S and AP were looking suspicious when they were passing the security check at the customs desk of the airport’s international terminal.

“X-ray scanning showed that there were suspicious things in their bodies and among their belongings,” Ngurah Rai Customs and Excise office head Himawan Indarjono told a press conference on Monday.

Following the X-ray, the police took them to the customs and excise room for a further check, including a body search. Customs officers found 36.2 grams methamphetamine in AA’s bag. A body search yielded three small packets of methamphetamine weighing 36.25 grams, 33.73 grams and 20.73 grams. “All those three packets were hidden in his rectum,” Himawan said.

A body search on S and AP also revealed drugs hidden in both of their rectums. From S, customs seized four small packets of meth, weighing 42.32 g, 44.81 g, 39.66 g and 38.78 g.

Officers found four packets of meth on AP — two in her rectum and two others in her vagina. In total she allegedly carried about 140 g of meth.

The three suspects are now facing drug charges, which carry a death penalty

Experts at the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Heritage and Archaeology recently concluded that the remains of an adult male in his sixties found at a burial site in central China was Cao Cao, the news portal Red Star News reported on Sunday.

Cao Cao was a central figure in China’s Three Kingdoms period (220-280) and later featured as a central character in the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

The archaeologists said they had discovered the ruins of a massive mausoleum park that included two constructions as well as a tunnel.

Experts said that such massive mausoleum was unusual at that time, which indicates Cao’s great power.

The discovery, made during an archaeological dig that took place in 2016 and 2017, has only just been made public.

Historical texts say that Cao made a will that ordered that his burial site should not be marked, but Zhou Ligang, a researcher at the institute who is in charge of the archaeological programme, said that the latest findings showed that Cao Pi, the son who succeeded him, did not follow his father’s will but built a great cemetery to honour his father and emphasise his filial piety.

But experts believe that the son later ordered the destruction of the monuments on the surface for fear that his father’s tomb would be targeted by opponents or robbers.

This would also explain why experts did not find massive piles of debris at the site. “This means that the demolition was not an act of revenge but was planned,” Zhou said.

“If the construction was knocked down by his opponents, there would be plenty of debris at the scene, but at Cao Cao’s mausoleum that is not in that case.”

To honour his father, Cao Pi must have ordered that all the debris be cleared, Zhou said.

Such findings have bolstered the theory that the remains of the male adult discovered in the main grave room of the mausoleum is likely to be Cao Cao.

A smaller grave found near the main grave room is believed to be that of Cao’s first son Cao Ang, who died at a young age, according to Pan Weibin, another expert at the institute.

The location of the burial site of Cao Cao has been shrouded in mystery for centuries as Cao, who appointed himself as a chancellor to the last emperor of the Han dynasty, ordered a ban on lavish burials, including his own.

But the first clues emerged in 2009, when archaeologists seized a stone tablet allegedly found in a tomb in Gaoxixue village in Anyang county, which bore the inscription “King Wu of Wei”, Cao Cao’s posthumous title.

The local authorities announced that this had identified the tomb as Cao Cao’s burial site, although experts remained sceptical at first.

Zhou said experts were still trying to figure out the identities of the two female adults buried in the same grave room of Cao Cao.

According to historical texts, Cao Cao was buried with his wife, who died in her seventies but one of the female adults was in her fifties and the other was in her twenties.

Zhou, said that a museum was being built at the site and it was expected to be finished within three years.

 If confirmed, it would mark Kim’s first trip abroad since coming to power in 2011 and signal an intriguing twist in a fast-developing diplomatic exercise that has opened the door to separate summits between Kim and the presidents of South Korea and the United States.

Some analysts had suggested China — the North’s only major ally — had been sidelined by the overtures from Pyongyang to Seoul and Washington, but a visit by Kim would put Beijing firmly back at the centre of the diplomatic equation.

Bill Bishop, publisher of the Sinocism China Newsletter, said President Xi Jinping likely wanted to meet with Kim before a summit with US President Donald Trump, which could take place in May.

“They’re concerned about being left out, with the North Koreans directly cutting a deal with the Americans that doesn’t necessarily reflect Chinese interests,” Bishop told AFP.

A possible visit was first reported by Japan’s Kyodo news agency, citing unidentified sources as saying that a high-ranking North Korean official had arrived in the Chinese capital on Monday.

Japanese broadcaster Nippon TV showed footage of a train — similar to that used for foreign visits by Kim’s late father Kim Jong Il — pulling in to Beijing Station and being met by a military honour guard and a convoy of black limousines.

At the Diaoyutai guest house, where Kim Jong Il stayed during his visits to Beijing, there was an unusually heavy police presence with officers stationed every 50-100 metres in front of the imposing compound.

An AFP photographer saw a motorcade of limousines leave the guest house under a police escort on Tuesday morning.

There was also heightened security at two possible venues for a high-level meeting —  the Great Hall of the People and Zhongnanhai, the central leadership compound next to Beijing’s Forbidden City.

– Official silence –

There was no mention of any visit by either the Chinese or North Korean state media, and a Chinese foreign ministry official told AFP on Tuesday that it was “not aware of the situation”.

China’s Weibo micro-blog was censoring searches for Kim Jong Un’s name and variations on it Tuesday. Beijing often tightens news controls during sensitive political periods.

South Korean broadcaster SBS TV said that guests at a hotel in the border city of Dandong, overlooking the train link from China to North Korea, had been asked to leave and curtains were drawn across the hotel windows.

The hotel will resume bookings on Wednesday afternoon, the broadcaster said, suggesting the train, and whoever might be on board, would have returned by then.

Kim Jong Il, who was known to be fearful of flying, visited China several times on his private, armoured train. His visits were confirmed by Chinese and North Korean state media only after he had left the country.

The younger Kim has not undertaken any official trip abroad since taking power following his father’s death in 2011. And he has yet to host a single head of state, having snubbed the president of Mongolia who visited Pyongyang in 2013.

In Washington, the White House said it was unable to confirm Kim’s presence in Pyongyang and the government in Seoul said only that it was closely monitoring the situation.

For decades Beijing has been Pyongyang’s key diplomatic protector and main source of trade and aid, but their relationship has soured in recent years.

Kim broke with tradition by not travelling to Beijing to pay his respects to Xi after the Chinese leader came to power, and Beijing has become increasingly frustrated with its neighbour’s nuclear weapon programme — showing a new willingness to agree to, and enforce, tougher UN sanctions.

At the same time, Beijing fears the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang and the instability it would bring, potentially sending waves of refugees into China and the possibility of US troops stationed on its border in a unified Korea.

High-level inter-Korean talks are scheduled for Thursday to pave the way for a summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in late April. Discussions have also begun on a possible summit with Trump in May.//AFP

If confirmed, it would mark Kim’s first trip abroad since coming to power in 2011 and signal an intriguing twist in a fast-developing diplomatic exercise that has opened the door to separate summits between Kim and the presidents of South Korea and the United States.

Some analysts had suggested China — the North’s only major ally — had been sidelined by the overtures from Pyongyang to Seoul and Washington, but a visit by Kim would put Beijing firmly back at the centre of the diplomatic equation.

Bill Bishop, publisher of the Sinocism China Newsletter, said President Xi Jinping likely wanted to meet with Kim before a summit with US President Donald Trump, which could take place in May.

“They’re concerned about being left out, with the North Koreans directly cutting a deal with the Americans that doesn’t necessarily reflect Chinese interests,” Bishop told AFP.

A possible visit was first reported by Japan’s Kyodo news agency, citing unidentified sources as saying that a high-ranking North Korean official had arrived in the Chinese capital on Monday.

Japanese broadcaster Nippon TV showed footage of a train — similar to that used for foreign visits by Kim’s late father Kim Jong Il — pulling in to Beijing Station and being met by a military honour guard and a convoy of black limousines.

At the Diaoyutai guest house, where Kim Jong Il stayed during his visits to Beijing, there was an unusually heavy police presence with officers stationed every 50-100 metres in front of the imposing compound.

An AFP photographer saw a motorcade of limousines leave the guest house under a police escort on Tuesday morning.

There was also heightened security at two possible venues for a high-level meeting — the Great Hall of the People and Zhongnanhai, the central leadership compound next to Beijing’s Forbidden City.

– Official silence –

There was no mention of any visit by either the Chinese or North Korean state media, and a Chinese foreign ministry official told AFP on Tuesday that it was “not aware of the situation”.

China’s Weibo micro-blog was censoring searches for Kim Jong Un’s name and variations on it Tuesday. Beijing often tightens news controls during sensitive political periods.

South Korean broadcaster SBS TV said that guests at a hotel in the border city of Dandong, overlooking the train link from China to North Korea, had been asked to leave and curtains were drawn across the hotel windows.

The hotel will resume bookings on Wednesday afternoon, the broadcaster said, suggesting the train, and whoever might be on board, would have returned by then.

Kim Jong Il, who was known to be fearful of flying, visited China several times on his private, armoured train. His visits were confirmed by Chinese and North Korean state media only after he had left the country.

The younger Kim has not undertaken any official trip abroad since taking power following his father’s death in 2011. And he has yet to host a single head of state, having snubbed the president of Mongolia who visited Pyongyang in 2013.

In Washington, the White House said it was unable to confirm Kim’s presence in Pyongyang and the government in Seoul said only that it was closely monitoring the situation.

For decades Beijing has been Pyongyang’s key diplomatic protector and main source of trade and aid, but their relationship has soured in recent years.

Kim broke with tradition by not travelling to Beijing to pay his respects to Xi after the Chinese leader came to power, and Beijing has become increasingly frustrated with its neighbour’s nuclear weapon programme — showing a new willingness to agree to, and enforce, tougher UN sanctions.

At the same time, Beijing fears the collapse of the regime in Pyongyang and the instability it would bring, potentially sending waves of refugees into China and the possibility of US troops stationed on its border in a unified Korea.

High-level inter-Korean talks are scheduled for Thursday to pave the way for a summit between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in late April. Discussions have also begun on a possible summit with Trump in May.