“We have identified the owner (of the car) but I cannot comment further as our investigation is still ongoing. We are still in the midst of tracking all the suspects down,” said Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun.

“We are uncertain if the suspects are still in the country or not.

“I have already asked Interpol to help in our investigations and we have contacted our friends in the region to assist us as well,” the Inspector-General of Police said at a press conference in conjunction with the 211th Police Day Buddhist prayer service at the Samadhi Vihara temple on Friday.

Mohamad Fuzi added that investigations led police to believe that the two suspects had an accomplice who aided their getaway.

“We are certain that there was a person already waiting for them at Danau Kota,” he said.

He added that police also believed that the suspects had lived in various places in the country before carrying out the assassination.

When asked if the police has been in contact with Hamas, he replied no, adding that they were instead liasing with the Palestine embassy here.

The Star reported that the 35-year-old Palestinian lecturer and member of the Islamist organisation Hamas, who was killed on April 22, was a marked man.

Based on CCTV footage, police have ruled out that he was the victim of a random shooting as other people walked past the two assailants and nothing happened to them.

In the 6am incident on April 21, two men in full-faced helmets on a high-powered motorcycle waited 20 minutes in the dark near Jalan Meranti in Setapak, before shooting Dr Fadi.

On a separate matter, the IGP has called for calm heads to prevail during Nomination Day on Saturday (April 28).

“This is our 14th general election and we have to display political maturity so as not to stir security concerns. This democratic process should run smoothly,” he said.

Everything about the inter-Korean summit had been minutely choreographed and rehearsed but the North’s Kim Jong Un went off-script when he invited his southern counterpart Moon Jae-in to join him over the border.

After a prolonged clasp lasting almost half a minute over the Military Demarcation Line that acts as the border, a beaming Moon invited his guest over to South Korea.

They posed for pictures as Kim became the first Northern leader to set foot in the country since Korean War hostilities ceased in 1953.

Kim then beckoned Moon over to the other side. Moon seemed initially hesitant but the North’s jovial young leader was not taking “no” for an answer, grabbing his hand and accompanying him across the border before they warmly shook hands again.

Grinning broadly, the pair then crossed back to the South hand-in-hand, in a remarkable image of unity.

More off-the-cuff moments followed as the leaders coralled the two delegations into an apparently unscheduled “team photo”.

It all went to show that even for a moment as carefully planned as the first inter-Korean summit in more than a decade, where the North’s nuclear arsenal will be high on the agenda, the best-laid preparations rarely run totally to schedule.

South Korean officials had carried out a full dress rehearsal on the eve of the summit, including stand-ins for the two leaders.

“We examined every single detail including lighting and flower decorations,” a Moon spokesman said.

– Cold buckwheat noodles –

The welcoming ceremony dripped with symbolism as the two men walked down a red carpet through an honour guard of South Korean soldiers colourfully dressed in traditional uniform lifting up banners as they went through.

They were also greeted by a military band, Moon saluting and Kim standing rather awkwardly not quite to attention, the first North Korean leader to inspect an honour guard from the South.

The pair seemed to share several relaxed moments, with Kim at one point breaking into a laugh as Moon pointed something out with a gesture during the ceremony, and the visitor from Pyongyang joking about noodles during his summit opening remarks as his sister and close adviser Kim Yo Jong took notes.

There were also moments of unexpected comedy as Yo Jong and another delegation member following the two leaders realised they were in shot and wildly swerved off to the side.

And the live TV pictures of the two leaders inspecting a picture of Mount Kumgang in North Korea were obstructed by a photographer standing in the way.

There was some awkwardness too as Kim took an age to sign the guest book, with Moon standing by seemingly not knowing where to look.

But also brief moments of tenderness, with Moon several times gently guiding his guest with a light hand on the back.

Their lingering handshake contrasted sharply with the greeting in 2000 between the current leader’s father Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung, a vigorous two-handed pumping affair lasting around five seconds.

The 2007 version was slightly more muted — three seconds and only one hand — as Kim Jong Il welcomed Roh Moo-hyun in Pyongyang.

The North has since made rapid progress in its weapons programmes, last year detonating its sixth and by far most powerful nuclear blast and launching missiles bringing the US mainland into range.

At times of tension, Pyongyang has threatened to unleash the “treasured sword” of its atomic arsenal and turn Seoul and the US into a “sea of flames”.

But the image that lingered on Friday was that of the two leaders hand-in-hand, walking across the border to the South toward a summit many hope could lead to a more peaceful future.

Walking across the cement blocks that mark the border was “so easy,” Kim said, making him wonder “why it took so long to do so after 11 years,” referring to the last summit in Pyongyang in 2007.

Kim is the first North Korean leader to set foot on the South’s territory since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a ceasefire.

At the Peace House venue in the heavily fortified truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone, Kim said: “I walked about 200 metres, flooded with emotion.”

A new period in inter-Korean history was beginning, he told Moon.

“I came here determined to send a starting signal at the threshold of a new history,” he said, promising a “frank, serious and honest mindset”.

At the two previous summits in 2000 and 2007, Kim’s father and predecessor Kim Jong Il met the then South Korean leaders with much fanfare, but ties soured after conservative administrations took power in Seoul in 2008 and Pyongyang accelerated its banned nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.

Kim suggested that he had been aware of scepticism over the latest summit and vowed to produce a lasting deal.

“No matter how good agreement or statement we produce here, if it is not implemented properly… it will only lead to disappointment,” Kim said.

“Unlike in the past when we failed to follow up and went back to where we had once started, I’d like to meet the expectations of the people,” he added, promising a “frank, serious and honest mindset”.

Moon voiced “admiration” for Kim’s “bold decision” to walk to the South, and hoped they would reach “a bold agreement so that we may give a big gift to the whole Korean people and the people who want peace”.

“I think both of us feel a heavy weight on our shoulders,” Moon told Kim.

“When you crossed the military border for the first time, Panmunjom became a symbol of peace, not a symbol of division.”

Friday’s closely watched meeting is heavy with political symbolism — including a dinner menu featuring the North’s signature dish.

Pyongyang brought a top chef to Panmunjom to cook the cold noodles, and Kim said he hoped that Moon will “enjoy our Pyongyang naengmyeon brought from afar.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say ‘afar’,” he added, prompting laughter from officials and Moon.

Men in sharp suits and matching blue and white striped ties fanned out ahead of and around Kim as he approached the Military Demarcation Line for a historic handshake with his Southern counterpart Moon Jae-in.

Some of the men had bulging pockets.

North Korea is one of the world’s most tightly-controlled societies, but even so security for its leader is iron-clad.

Foreigners attending any event where Kim will be present must go through hours of security procedures beforehand, and surrender all electronics, including phones.

The Guard Command, the military unit tasked with ensuring the safety of the leadership, is an elite institution close to the centre of North Korean power — it provides the centrepiece display of the annual kimjongilia and kimilsungia flower festivals in Pyongyang to honour Kim’s father and grandfather.

Ri Yong Guk, a defector from the North who served on a security detail for Kim Jong Il, wrote in a 2013 memoir that as many as six different layers of security guards protected the leader on trips to the countryside to inspect military units, plants or farms.

“It is one of the world’s tightest security blankets through which even a single ant would find it hard to go,” he wrote.

The arrangements for the current leader are reportedly even tighter, and during a military parade marking the 70th anniversary of the foundation of its regular armed forces in February, Pyongyang paraded three kinds of security units dedicated to protecting Kim’s life.

Kim was repeatedly seen accompanied by a stout military general in uniform with a holstered gun.

The protection afforded to the Kim family was also on display when the leader’s sister Kim Yo Jong visited the South for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, accompanied by tall bodyguards with crew cuts, sunglasses and earphones.

‘Scariest place on Earth’

Former US president Bill Clinton once described the Demilitarized Zone that divides the peninsula and where Friday’s summit was being held as “the scariest place on Earth”.

Despite its name, the DMZ is among the most heavily fortified areas on the planet.

Around 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of the South Korean capital Seoul, the four-kilometre-wide space stretches for 250 kilometres across Korea and bristles with electric fences, minefields and anti-tank barriers.

At the joint security area at Panmunjom the two sides, technically still at war, come face-to-face, with stern South Korean guards — also chosen for their height and looks — standing stock still only metres from the North Korean positions.

Soldiers are permitted to carry only sidearms in the area, but it is an open secret that both sides have larger weapons stashed nearby for use in case of emergencies.

In November a North Korean soldier defected under a hail of automatic rifle fire from his comrades.

Back in 1984, a 22-year-old Soviet tourist bolted from North to South at Panmunjom, triggering a gun battle in which three pursuing North Korean soldiers were killed, along with a Southern trooper, although defector Vasily Matuzok was unharmed.

The handshake between the two leaders marked the latest milestone in a rapid rapprochement after months of global fears about a nuclear conflict.

Here are some other handshakes that shook the world:

Arafat-Rabin, 1993

After months of secret negotiations in Norway, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat stood in the South Lawn of the White House on September 13, 1993 to witness the signing of the Oslo Accords.

And then, in one of the most dramatic moments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Clinton’s arms stretched around both leaders, Arafat and Rabin shook hands.

The abortive process granted autonomy to the occupied Palestinian territories without creating a separate state, and ended the six-year-long popular Palestinian uprising — the Intifada — in which over 1,200 Palestinians and around 150 Israelis were killed.

Rabin was assassinated a year later by a Jewish extremist opposed to the peace process, which faltered in the years that followed. A second Intifada broke out in 2000.

Obama-Castro, 2013

At a memorial service for Nelson Mandela in 2013, US President Barack Obama made headlines when he shook hands with Cuba’s Raul Castro, the first such public greeting between leaders of the bitter neighbours after decades of enmity.

Within months, there was a rapid thaw. Full diplomatic relations were restored in July 2015, followed by once-unthinkable steps to mend ties after more than half a century of enmity.

Obama visited Cuba in 2016 — the first such trip by an American president in 88 years.Washington also relaxed its decades-long embargo on the communist-ruled island, and US airlines resumed direct flights to Havana in November 2016.

Queen Elizabeth-McGuinness, 2012

In a landmark moment in the Northern Ireland peace process, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II met Martin McGuinness, a former top commander in the paramilitary Irish Republican Army during the many years of bloody hostilities with British forces.

The IRA wanted an end to British rule in the province, and for it to be merged with the Republic of Ireland. McGuinness later became one of the figures that helped negotiate an end to the violence.

McGuinness — then a deputy first minister of Northern Ireland — shook hands with the Queen during her 2012 visit to the province.

It was a gesture towards reconciliation that would once have been unimaginable, with McGuinness’ militant past and British security operations still a source of anger for many.

Xi-Ma, 2015

After decades of estrangement following a traumatic split at the end of a civil war in 1949, the presidents of China and Taiwan met for the first time ever in Singapore.

In unprecedented scenes, China’s Xi Jinping and Taiwan’s Ma Ying-jeou shook hands for more than a minute and smiled for a mass of reporters before holding talks. The summit led to the setting up of a hotline between Beijing and Taipei and a lowering of tensions between the self-ruled island and the mainland.

While the meeting was undeniably historic, there were no major concessions from either side. Ma ended up paying a heavy political price at home: Taiwanese voters chose to back Beijing-sceptic Tsai Ing-wen in the 2016 election amid fears about the island’s sovereignty.

Donald Trump

The next major handshake on the global calendar is expected to feature Kim Jong Un again — this time with US President Donald Trump.

While it will certainly mark a historic moment, handshakes involving Trump sometimes make headlines for the wrong reasons, and the businessman-president has become well-known for his awkward grapples.

Clips of his handshakes often go viral on social media, with commenters poking fun at the way he tries to pull another world leader’s arm or the often-uncomfortable amount of time he spends shaking hands. Most famously, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last year appeared to roll his eyes in an apparent expression of relief after a long handshake with Trump in Washington.

Quite how Kim might react to an impromptu arm-wrestle, only time will tell.

Pompeo overcame stiff opposition in the Senate from Democrats who warned he would add fuel to Trump’s aggressive foreign policy.

But ultimately, the 54-year-old West Point graduate and former congressman beat back critics, easily winning Senate confirmation in a 57-42 vote.

Just over one hour later, he was sworn in as secretary of state by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito at the White House.

The State Department immediately announced Pompeo would lead the US delegation to NATO foreign minister talks in Brussels on Friday, and follow that with stops in Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, stops chosen to reflect their “importance as key allies and partners in the region,” the department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said.

Trump: ‘He has my trust’

“Having a patriot of Mike’s immense talent, energy and intellect leading the Department of State will be an incredible asset for our country at this critical time in history,” Trump said in a statement.

“He will always put the interests of America first. He has my trust. He has my support.”

After the swearing-in ceremony, Pompeo said he was “completely humbled by the responsibility” of his new post.

“I’m looking forward to serving the American people and getting to work right away,” he added.

Pompeo replaces Rex Tillerson, the former oil executive Trump fired in March after a year of tensions with the White House over policy and turmoil in the State Department, where his cutbacks and aloofness alienated staff and left the body deeply demoralized.

But where Tillerson was seen as a voice of moderation in the Trump administration, Pompeo is viewed as a hawk who could combine with new White House National Security Advisor John Bolton to back Trump’s aggressive posturing on the world stage.

Promises diplomacy, ‘swagger’

In a bruising fight against his appointment, Democrats accused Pompeo as too bellicose and harboring anti-Muslim and homophobic sentiments.

During his confirmation hearing at the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Pompeo rejected those accusations.

He insisted his focus will be on diplomatic solutions to problems, while pledging to bring “swagger once again” to the State Department.

“One of the many values of robust diplomacy is that it increases our chances of solving problems peacefully, without ever firing a shot,” Pompeo said.

Secret North Korea trip

Thursday’s move to the state department marks the high point so far in the career of the ambitious Pompeo, who some say has his eyes on the White House.

He graduated first in his class at the elite US Military Academy at West Point, and later earned a law degree from Harvard.

Pompeo served four terms as a Republican congressman from Kansas before Trump tapped him to head the Central Intelligence Agency last year.

There, he promised a more “vicious” intelligence operation, making unapologetically menacing statements toward North Korea and Iran.

He also earned Trump’s ear in regular intelligence briefings at the White House, accommodating Trump’s desire for simplified, visual presentations rather than detailed written assessments of the world’s security dangers.

Behind the scenes, he made numerous trips abroad to meet foreign political and security leaders, especially in the Middle East.

He also took the lead in creating a dialogue with North Korea as Pyongyang demonstrated its theoretical ability to strike the United States with a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile.

In late March, Pompeo secretly traveled to Pyongyang, where he met with Kim to discuss what could become a historic summit between the two countries possibly as early as in May.

The White House released pictures from their meeting Thursday, attesting to Pompeo’s central role in relations with North Korea.

That served to underscore that he could easily slip into the diplomatic driver’s seat as soon as he was sworn in.

US Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison said she was “pleased that he will be leading the delegation” to the NATO meeting. “His efforts to come to Brussels tonight shows America’s commitment to NATO and our Allies and Partners,” she said.

The meeting on the southern side of the truce village of Panmunjom — only the third of its kind since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War — is intended to pave the way for a much-anticipated encounter between the North’s leader Kim Jong Un and US President Donald Trump.

In the most detailed direct reference to the process by the North so far, the official KCNA news agency said Kim will “open-heartedly discuss… all the issues arising in improving inter-Korean relations and achieving peace, prosperity and reunification of the Korean peninsula”.

With helicopters buzzing overhead, South Korean President Moon Jae-in left his Blue House office in a convoy of more than a dozen vehicles along a road lined with wellwishers waving Korean flags.

Before his departure, a smiling Moon stopped to greet supporters and thank police officers.

Moon will greet Kim at the concrete blocks that mark the border between the two Koreas in the Demilitarized Zone to begin the rare occasion laden with symbolism.

And when Kim steps over the line he will become the first North Korean leader to set foot in the South since the Korean War ended 65 years ago.

The North’s nuclear arsenal will be high on the agenda at the talks.

Last year Pyongyang carried out its sixth nuclear blast, by far its most powerful to date, and launched missiles capable of reaching the US mainland.

Its actions sent tensions soaring as Kim and Trump traded personal insults and threats of war.

Moon seized on the South’s Winter Olympics as an opportunity to broker dialogue between them, and has said his meeting with Kim will serve to set up the summit between Pyongyang and Washington.

Trump has demanded the North give up its weapons, and Washington is pressing for it to do so in a complete, verifiable and irreversible way.

But Seoul played down expectations Thursday, saying the North’s technological advances with its nuclear and missile programmes meant any deal would be “fundamentally different in nature from denuclearisation agreements in 1990s and early 2000s”.

“That’s what makes this summit all the more difficult,” the chief of the South’s presidential secretariat Im Jong-seok told reporters.

Peace and denuclearisation

Pyongyang is demanding as yet unspecified security guarantees to discuss its arsenal.

When Kim visited the North’s key backer Beijing last month in only his first foreign trip as leader, China’s official Xinhua news agency cited him saying that the issue could be resolved, as long as Seoul and Washington take “progressive and synchronous measures for the realisation of peace”.

In the past, North Korean support for denuclearisation of the “Korean peninsula” has been code for the removal of US troops from the South and the end of its nuclear umbrella over its security ally — prospects unthinkable in Washington.

“The big issues we know are peace and denuclearisation,” Yonsei University professor John Delury told AFP.

The two Koreas “can do a lot more on peace than on denuclearisation”, he said, but the post-summit statement will give “a lot of chance to analyse every word, reading between the lines, look for things that are there and not there”.

Pyongyang announced last week a moratorium on nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missiles, adding it would dismantle its Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

But it also said it had completed the development of its weapons and had no need for further tests.

Seoul has also promoted the idea of opening talks towards a peace treaty to formally end the 1950-53 Korean War, when hostilities stopped with a ceasefire, leaving the neighbours technically in a state of conflict.

Reunions of families left divided by the war could also be discussed at the summit, and Moon has told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe he will raise the emotive subject of Japanese citizens kidnapped by the North.

Assault-rifle wielding police were posted at entry points to the once-pristine island that has become tainted by heavy commercialisation and overdevelopment.

Regional police head Cesar Binag told AFP the shutdown began past midnight, with tourists barred from boarding the ferry that is the main way onto the island.

“Boracay is officially closed to tourists. We are not closing establishments but tourists cannot enter. We are implementing the instruction of the president,” Binag said.

About 600 policemen were deployed, with some performing life-like drills including riot officers battling bottle-hurling protesters and mock hostage taking of sunbathers — all before startled locals.

“It looks like we are at war,” Jessica Gabay, a grocery seller, told AFP late Wednesday.”Maybe the authorities are doing this to instil fear so people will follow the rules.”

President Rodrigo Duterte ordered the shutdown this month after calling the resort a “cesspool”, dirtied by tourism-related businesses dumping raw sewage directly into the ocean.

During the closure only residents with ID cards are allowed to board ferries to the tiny island that is home to around 40,000 people.

On Thursday morning, police began patrolling the beach to enforce a rule prohibiting swimming except in one designated area marked by buoys.

Boats are barred from sailing within three kilometres (1.9 miles) of the shoreline and only Boracay residents are allowed to fish in its waters.

The government said the heavy security presence was intended to squelch any unrest from those unhappy with the shutdown, including some of the roughly 30,000 people employed in the island’s bustling tourist trade.

But resistance was light in the run-up to the closure, with no violent protests and most of the criticism focusing on the plight of laid-off staff.

The workers have been drawn by the relatively good wages on the island that has seen the number of visitors roughly quadruple to two million since 2006.

Years of unchecked growth 

Those tourists, a growing number of whom are Chinese and Korean, pumped roughly $1 billion in revenue into the Philippine economy last year.

But its growth from a sleepy backpacker hideaway into a mass-tourism hub with fast food outlets on the beach has taken a toll.

Unchecked construction has eaten away at the island’s natural beauty, while slimy algae-filled waves in some areas and mountains of discarded drink bottles are problems acknowledged even by critics of the shutdown.

“I’m all for rehabilitation and preserving it but clearly this is not the way to do it,” Philippine politics expert Ashley Acedillo told AFP.

He called the closure an “ill-thought through, unplanned and knee-jerk action” that did not take into account the economic impact on the island’s workers and business community.

The Philippines has pledged to use the closure to shore up the island’s infrastructure, bulldoze illegal structures and clean up the mess left by years of unchecked growth.

For its part, the government has billed it as a long-overdue response to a problem that is not without precedent.

Other Southeast Asian tourism destinations have also cracked down on uncontrolled tourism welcomed by locals needing income and authorities eager for development.

Thailand’s Maya Bay, made famous by the 2000 movie “The Beach” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, will be off limits for four months from June to September, officials announced last month, in a bid to save its ravaged coral reefs.

The three were identified as Liao Guan Yu, Chen Wei Cyuan and Hsu Yung Li. “The defendants have been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” presiding judge Efendi Mukhtar read out the verdict.

While there was no mitigating factor to hand down a lighter sentence, the judge said the crime had contravened government efforts to fight illegal drugs and could harm the country’s future generations.

According to a statement in the previous hearing, the three men were waiting in Anyer Beach in the province of Banten for the five other suspects to offload the amphetamines from a Taiwanese yacht. The police said the drugs weighed 1 metric ton and were worth Rp 2 trillion (US$143.9 million).

The three remained silent when a translator delivered the judge’s verdict. The court will issue another verdict to the other five in a separate hearing on Thursday.