"(In an airport), you can easily approach your target in a crowd, you can easily extract in the crowd, you know where your target is gonna be in a certain time in a certain place, and you know your target won't have weapons," said the journalist-cum-historian, citing his conversations with special forces personnel.

"The fact that it was female assassins and done with poison, it looks like it's got North Korean fingerprints on it," he noted. "We got many precedents for that in North Korea's recent history."

He said if the murder is proved to be the work of the reclusive country, "this shows how really, really dangerously ruthless this regime is we are dealing with."

Kim Jong-nam, 46, was murdered with poison at Kuala Lumpur International Airport on Monday before boarding a flight to Macao.

The Malaysian police is currently trying to determine who is behind the murder although his brother is largely reported to have ordered it.

Touching on inter-Korean relations, Salmon said using both talks and military pressure toward North Korea is important in dealing with the communist country.

"Offering them the treaty to end the Korean War would be a good piece of leverage that we never used, but we should use it," he said, referring to the option of signing a peace treaty that could replace the current truce agreement the two sides have.

In a ceremony at the British Embassy in Seoul, Salmon was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire on Thursday in recognition of his history books on the Korean War for which Britain deployed more than 80,000 troops. It was the biggest force sent to the South Korean side, except the one sent by the United States.

His books on the civil war include "Scorched Earth Black Snow" and "To the Last Round." He is currently writing another book featuring the continuing inter-Korean battles after the Korean War, which will be published about two years later.

"I am very happy today that I am in a position to be able to hand over to Andy Salmon on behalf of Her Majesty Queen (Elizabeth II), the award," UK Ambassador to South Korea Charles Hay said in the awards ceremony.

"What Andy has done was to bring human dimensions to the war ... (while) military histories tend to be dry matters of battlefield stories and lost sight of individuals who were taking part," the ambassador noted. (Yonhap)