Widespread local and international reports that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il spent a year in Malta have been turned on their head by former Prime Minister Dom Mintoff, who maintains that the man who studied English on the island was actually the dictator's half-brother.

A report in M magazine, distributed with today's The Times, reveals that Kim Pyong-il, North Korea's ambassador to Poland, lived at Mr Mintoff's home in Mtahleb with his wife and child.

Malta's former Prime Minister was closer than most to the man dubbed in North Korea as the Great Leader for three decades, Kim il-Sung, who died in 1994, and was entrusted with the care of one of his sons. The visit was shrouded in secrecy but it was reported at the time - in Malta and abroad - that the man in Malta was Kim Jong-il, Kim il-Sung's eldest son. The CIA also believed it was the prospective North Korean leader.

Writing in 2002, The Guardian columnist Peter Preston also said that he remembered the first confirmed sightings of Kim Jong il in Malta as he picked up "his first lessons in sophisticated statecraft from Dom Mintoff". But when contacted by M he said he learnt after the article was written that it was most probably a case of mistaken identity.