Was it a murder, or a smuggling operation gone wrong? And will anyone outside a small ring of perps and government officials ever really know? Why use ten million dollars in material to kill someone, when you could do it for loose change in lead?
British investigators believe that Alexander Litvinenko’s killers used more than $10 million of polonium-210 to poison him. Preliminary findings from the post mortem examination on the former KGB spy suggest that he was given more than ten times the lethal dose.
From the beginning, it struck me as one of those mysteries bound to end with more questions than answers. But AJ Strata isn't giving up.
When you add up all the facts in this story, $10M worth of pulonium 210, Litvinenko being a convert to Islam, traces of pulonium 210 literally all over the place it sure looks like they were hauling the makings of a dirty bomb. Wonder where all that nuke material ended up?
Posted by: Buzzy | Monday, December 18, 2006 at 01:03 AM
everybody's quick to jump on the "blame the kgb" bandwagon, and i suppose you can't blame them: the kgb IS fulla commies, after all.
but i wonder. maybe it's due to reading too many tom clancy books, but litvinenko's poisoning, while scarily creative & exotic, allowed him to linger on for days & days, babbling all kinds of uncomplimentary things about russia, putin, the fsb, and all that. i would tend to think that's sort of counter to the desired effect of a political assasination. ideally, your target dies right away, and never says a word.
the kgb was in business for a long time - and since the ussr (and putin) have no morals to speak of, i'm pretty sure they did a lot of political assasinations. that being the case, having had all that practice, why'd the litvinenko killing drag on & on & on? $10 million bucks (!) and the guy lives for a week, yapping the whole time? who did THAT? mr. bean?? james bond-style villains screw up killings by making them overly dramatic & complex. (see: mr. incredible laughing about the villain making a mistake by 'monologuing me') real-world bad guys don't.
so who *did* whack him then?
Posted by: larry | Monday, December 18, 2006 at 04:22 AM
Just being a convert to Islam is reason enough to whack someone. Remember it's the Islamists who play the victim/propaganda game. Big picture-lots of publicity-poor muslim-bad russia.
Posted by: splashtc | Monday, December 18, 2006 at 09:34 AM
The only reason the KGB might use Polonium is to frighten. They could have killed this guy in minutes, maybe seconds, and it would have looked like a heart attack. Maybe that wouldn't have fooled everyone but it wouldn't cost anything and he would be gone.
So if the KGB did it this way they had orders to make it gruesome and visible - international news.
A guess - no KGB, some Polonium was being dealt, and great hilarity did not follow.
Posted by: K | Monday, December 18, 2006 at 11:43 AM