© REUTERS / KCNABill Clinton met Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in August but there is strong evidence that the North Korean leader has used lookalikes in the past
In the absence of fact, the Hermit Kingdom has long been a free-fire zone for outlandish rumour. And they got more outlandish than ever after Mr Kim reputedly suffered a stroke in August 2008. Mr Kim was variously said to be close to death, about to be toppled by a coup, or desperately fixing the succession for his youngest son. Or was he really someone else?
The mainstay of the Kim-is-fake cottage industry is a Japanese university professor called Toshimitsu Shigemura, who once claimed that the real Mr Kim died in 2003, and that everything since has been make-believe. One Mr Kim, he maintains, even flatly confessed to a Japanese visitor, "I am a double."
