Clinton met fake Kim Jong-il, claims Japanese academic - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

A Japanese university professor has claimed that former US President Bill Clinton met a fake North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in August this year. He also said that the original communist dictator had died in 2003. Japanese university professor Toshimitsu Shigemura has always claimed that the real Kim died six years ago, and that everything since has been make-believe. One Kim, he maintains, even flatly confessed to a Japanese visitor, "I am a double." The Clinton visit in August saw the former American President pictured alongside a far healthier looking Kim than the wan and feeble Great Leader seen after North Korea test-fired a long-range missile on April 5 2009. "They were totally different people," Shigemura told the Christian Science Monitor this week. According to The Independent, most experts can't quite believe the North would have sent out a bogus Kim to spend more than three hours in Clinton's company, including what the North's official media called 75 minutes of "exhaustive" private talks. But evidence that he sometimes uses doubles is strong. A double, or doubles, are "possible", Choi Jin-Wook, a specialist at the Korea Institute of National Reunification told the Monitor. Fakery moreover is nothing new for totalitarian regimes. The Soviet Union was doctoring photos from its very earliest days. Saddam Hussein is known to have made much use of doubles; so too, it is said.