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Alexander Litvinenko confirmed dead?

hob

hob

macrumors 68010
Original poster
Oct 4, 2003
2,004
0
London, UK
Alexander Litvinenko's death at 21.19 today was just announced on BBC Newsnight.

Nowhere else I can find is covering the story just yet. Guess it's a bit on the late side in the UK, but I would expect Reuters or someone to have picked it up by now!

I was struggling to see why this was a big story till the other day. It's quite significant if you think about it...
 
guess it took a while to filter through. quite a while.

isn't it shocking that these things still happen?
 
It's a little haunting I reckon. Reminds me of that other Russian (perhaps?) guy who was slowly being poisoned.

What a crap way to die :( poor guy.
 
KGB working to it's fullest. If Russia had anything to do with it, shows the Kremlin hasn't lost a step in its actions.
 
Dont Hurt Me said:
Seems speaking anything anti Russian or anti Syrian these days leads to this kind of outcome.
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It does, doesn't it. Although it's not always the usual suspects who come and get you of course... it can be the other side, who being so discredited in other areas, do it for the purposes of reviving support for their own agenda.
 
Sesshi said:
It does, doesn't it. Although it's not always the usual suspects who come and get you of course... it can be the other side, who being so discredited in other areas, do it for the purposes of reviving support for their own agenda.
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True, two sides seems to benefit from his death, Putin who are no longer criticized from the apparently very vocal Litvinenko, and the opponents of Putin, who are suddently at the center of the media spotlight.
However, if it's true that he was killed by this apparently very rare polonium-210, that supposedly are made in nuclear reacters and particle accelerators, I'm inclined to suspect the Russians.
 
But it's so obviously elaborate. Why any secret service would go to this length, knowing it would be huge news internationally, when a well-placed knife or bullet would accomplish the same thing, is a complete mystery.

And has been pointed out elsewhere, the Kremlin thought he was small fry. Why would Putin unleash this sort of international scrutiny in the midst of an EU summit? I'm inclined to believe that it was a third party, not the Russians.

Still, we shall see as things unfold.
 
I agree, however, if some third-party player wanted him killed to blame it on the Russians, wouldn't they want to use a poison that's easier to detect? It sounds like it was pure luck that this polonium was discovered in his urine. And if it really is so rare, probably only very few people have access to it.

But then again, if somebody wanted to frame the Russians, the way that the events have unfolded have played right into their hands:
Known Kremlin critic poisoned by a very rare radioactive(!) substance that is very hard to detect, yet miracously recovered by british specialists.
The only problems with this scenario being how to acquire the polonium, and how to make sure it is found. But of course that may be a part of their elaborate plot.

I guess we'll have to wait and see what happens, hopefully the Scotland Yard will unravel things for us.
 
I wonder if they can trace the Polonium back to its original source? I mean, how many places and people in the world have access to such a thing?

Blue Velvet said:
And has been pointed out elsewhere, the Kremlin thought he was small fry. Why would Putin unleash this sort of international scrutiny in the midst of an EU summit? I'm inclined to believe that it was a third party, not the Russians.
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Well this person must have had a lot of power in order to get a poison this rare.
 
I saw Putin putting the spin on this and it sounded like spin. Just like the Syrians spinning all the murders in Lebanon. Lets face it Russia isnt a democracy, Its being ran by communist just like the old days and look at Syria, not a democracy either. Its not like just anyone can get a hold of this rare element.
 
Dont Hurt Me said:
I saw Putin putting the spin on this and it sounded like spin. Just like the Syrians spinning all the murders in Lebanon. Lets face it Russia isnt a democracy, Its being ran by communist just like the old days and look at Syria, not a democracy either. Its not like just anyone can get a hold of this rare element.
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$69.00 to you sir, tourist price.

http://www.unitednuclear.com/isotopes.htm
 
i know this is way of base but....

do they have a russian mafia? Couldn't they somehow get the plutonium 210? Would they have a reason to blame it on the Kremlin? :rolleyes:


Just somethings to think about.
 
Blue Velvet said:
Why any secret service would go to this length, knowing it would be huge news internationally, when a well-placed knife or bullet would accomplish the same thing, is a complete mystery.
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I agree that it's massively over elaborate. Too much so really.

And it has done much more to further his cause and raise awareness. Makes you wonder...
 
I got a very interesting email through one of my university tutors this morning:

XXX wrote:
He said: "If this note really appeared before the death of Mr Livenenko, I wonder why it wasn't published while he was still alive. If it appeared after his death I don't think there are any comments that can be made." Is Putin suggesting that the hospital authorities are lying?

This is just to clarify the backdrop for Putin’s comment on Litvinenko’s posthumous statement. The statement was allegedly dictated on November, 21 and read off by Alex Goldfarb on November, 24: (eg: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6180262.stm)
As for my personal communication with Litvinenko, he didn’t speak good English, which means the letter had to be at least corrected by somebody. But more important is the personality of Mr Goldfarb. He is now represented in the media as ‘a friend of Litvinenko’; yet he was better known for being Executive Director of the ‘International Foundation for Civil Liberties’ founded in 2000 by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky (eg: http://www.chechentimes.org/en/news/?id=9412).
For those who are unfamiliar with the character of Mr Berezovsky and his uneasy relationships with Russia’s recent history, as well as with Putin, there is a random article in the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/guardianweekly/story/0,,1424383,00.html

The best book about Berezovsky to date is Paul Khlebnikov’s “Godfarther of the Kremlin”, in which Berezovsky is portrayed as a mafia boss who had his rivals murdered (Khlebnikov himself was murdeved in 2004).
Some say it is Berezovsky who benefits politically from the accusations against Putin in the Litvinenko case.

I would also like to caution the members of this list that the critical thinking that we cherish so much in academia seizes to be ‘critical’ once it becomes the commonplace or ‘the hegemonic thinking’.
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Blue Velvet said:
But it's so obviously elaborate. Why any secret service would go to this length, knowing it would be huge news internationally, when a well-placed knife or bullet would accomplish the same thing, is a complete mystery.
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I think that the reason it is so big is because the KGB wanted to kill who he was talking to as well which is why they used a very toxic element in high amounts in multiple places.


Or London has a serious problem with toxic substances
 
eva01 said:
I think that the reason it is so big is because the KGB wanted to kill who he was talking to as well which is why they used a very toxic element in high amounts in multiple places.


Or London has a serious problem with toxic substances
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Who knows what crap fish have to eat these days ;)
 
eva01 said:
I think that the reason it is so big is because the KGB wanted to kill who he was talking to as well which is why they used a very toxic element in high amounts in multiple places.
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The longer this goes on, the less inclined I am to believe it has anything to do with state-sanctioned assassination directly ordered by Mr. Putin. And it seems the British government is inclined to agree... lots of Russki-bashing makes good headlines but it doesn't add up, I'm afraid.
 
I also am inclined to think this is not state sponsored alphabet people,at least not Russian ones (if it was another states alphabet people that raises more murky theories).The FSB are more than capable of removing someone by remote control with absolutely no suspicious evidence.Hell they rate right up there with the CIA and Mossad in the devious stakes.
 
Peterkro said:
The FSB are more than capable of removing someone by remote control with absolutely no suspicious evidence.Hell they rate right up there with the CIA and Mossad in the devious stakes.
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Well, that's not quite so. A couple years ago former Chechen leader was killed in Qatar, the assasins were captured and they were very much FSB people. They were released only after direct negotiations of Putin with the leader of Qatar.

Here's another poisoning story Mystery illness hits former Russian PM
 
Apparently, the BBC reported that "The radioactive substance implicated is as difficult to obtain as it can be to detect."

However, The Register seem to have found it for sale online, which I'd also heard reported on TV somewhere...
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1963270,00.html

The Litvinenko murder is being used by neocons in their campaign against Putin's national revival

Neil Clark
Monday December 4, 2006
The Guardian

Three weeks on, we are still no closer to knowing who was responsible for the death of the former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. The use of polonium 210 as a murder weapon could point in entirely opposite directions. It might suggest that the killing was carried out on behalf of the Russian security service as a public warning to others who might think of betraying it. But it could also be read as an attempt by President Putin's rich and powerful enemies to discredit the Russian government internationally. Whatever the truth, it has been seized upon across Europe and the US to fuel a growing anti-Russian campaign.

There are certainly grounds for criticising the Russian government from a progressive perspective. Putin has introduced a flat-rate income tax, which greatly benefits the wealthy, and plans the partial marketisation of Russia's education and health systems. He has pursued a bloody campaign of repression in Chechnya. And while some of Russia's oligarchs have been bought to justice, others remain free to flaunt their dubiously acquired wealth, in a country where the gap between rich and poor has become chasmic.

Even so, those on the centre-left who have joined the current wave of Putin-bashing ought to consider whose cause they are serving. Long before the deaths of Litvinenko and the campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Russophobes in the US and their allies in Britain were doing all they could to discredit Putin's administration. These rightwing hawks are gunning for Putin not because of concern for human rights but because an independent Russia stands in the way of their plans for global hegemony. The neoconservative grand strategy was recorded in the leaked Wolfowitz memorandum, a secret 1990s Pentagon document that targeted Russia as the biggest future threat to US geostrategic ambitions and projected a US-Russian confrontation over Nato expansion.

Even though Putin has acquiesced in the expansion of American influence in former Soviet republics, the limited steps the Russian president has taken to defend his country's interests have proved too much for Washington's empire builders. In 2003, Bruce P Jackson, the director of the Project for a New American Century, wrote that Putin's partial renationalisation of energy companies threatened the west's "democratic objectives" - and claimed Putin had established a "de facto cold war administration". Jackson's prognosis was simple: a new "soft war" against the Kremlin, a call to arms that has been enthusiastically followed in both the US and Britain.

Every measure Putin has taken has been portrayed by the Russophobes as the work of a sinister totalitarian. Gazprom's decision to start charging Ukraine the going rate for its gas last winter was presented as a threat to the future of western Europe. And while western interference in elections in Ukraine, Georgia and other ex-Soviet republics has been justified on grounds of spreading democracy, any Russian involvement in the affairs of its neighbours has been spun as an attempt to recreate the "evil empire". As part of their strategy, Washington's hawks have been busy promoting Chechen separatism in furtherance of their anti-Putin campaign, as well as championing some of Russia's most notorious oligarchs.

In the absence of genuine evidence of Russian state involvement in the killings of Litvinenko and Politkovskaya, we should be wary about jumping on a bandwagon orchestrated by the people who bought death and destruction to the streets of Baghdad, and whose aim is to neuter any counterweight to the most powerful empire ever seen.​
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I think it's Bereshovsky, the NeoCons, the Chechens and the Israelis. Probably working in concert with OBL.
 
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