Kim Jong Un body double: Czech experts check his photos

Czech experts have tested whether North Korean leader Kim Jong Un really has a body double. A team led by Jakub Paplham at the machine learning group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague found no sign of a substitution, but stresses that this cannot be treated as conclusive proof.

What the computer analysis showed

The team used four face recognition models and also compared the images with 142 other photographs, including shots not only from the North Korean agency KCNA but also pictures of Howard X, a well-known Kim impersonator. Special attention went to a photo from the Sept. 9, 2021, military parade, around which rumors of a double arose. According to the results, it did not stand out noticeably from the rest either.

“All ten photos from 2012 to 2026 resemble one another the way photos of a single person usually do,” Paplham said. He also warned that if you know an impersonator exists, the model easily tells him apart from Kim, but if you do not know, it will assign him to Kim.

What the anthropologist saw

Forensic anthropologist Petra Urbanová of Masaryk University looked for stable individual features: a scar above the right eye, a gap between the teeth, different proportions of the upper incisors, the shape of the ears. In her words, the photos show the same person, and a double would find it very hard to reproduce all of these features. Weight, age and facial expression can change a person’s appearance, but these traits remain relatively stable.

The most interesting image in the series is the 2021 one, in which Kim looks noticeably younger and slimmer. Urbanová believes this is not a double but an edited photo with added characteristics that do not match him. Under her working hypothesis, Kim’s image may have been combined with a photo of another, slimmer person. To confirm this, she would need the original file and its metadata.

Rumors online

Korean studies scholar Nina Špitálníková is also skeptical of double theories. Such rumors, she says, are mostly spread by internet trolls, and the people who write about them do not look for where the story began. A similar wave came in 2020: Kim did not appear in public for almost three weeks, and talk spread that he was ill or had died. When he showed up on May 1 at the opening of a fertilizer plant, some people claimed the man in the photos was a double.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz