Former Spy Poisoned By Radiation In UK

An anonymous reader writes "BBC new is reporting the death of the ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko with a major dose of radioactive polonium-210. But nobody knows how it got there. Suspicions have fallen upon the Russian security services (who deny involvement). The task of the pathologists now is to unpick what really killed him and how it was administered. Quite what techniques they will use to solve this puzzle is unclear." From the article: "A post-mortem examination on Mr Litvinenko has not been held yet. The delay is believed to be over concerns about the health implications for those present at the examination. But Roger Cox from the HPA said a large quantity of alpha radiation emitted from polonium-210 had been detected in Mr Litvinenko's urine."

Comments

examination

[bcrowell]

The delay is believed to be over concerns about the health implications for those present at the examination.
If they're concerned, they're too ignorant about science to be qualified to do the exam. The rule of thumb is that alpas are stopped by air. Even if the guy's body fluids got on you, the alphas wouldn't get through your epidermis -- and I assume people doing autopsies are going to be wearing latex gloves, a mask, etc., since they don't want to get exposed to AIDS, etc.

Re:examination

[stair69]

Though you're right that alpha doesn't penetrate the skin, you still need to take extreme care with Polonium. The reason is that it has a tendency to become airbourne even at room temperature, and once in the air it is there is inhalation danger to people nearby unless they are wearing respirators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium#Chemical_cha racteristics

The high level of alpha decay in Po-210 is responsible for this evaporation (spallation) - alpha collisions with atoms near the surface can cause atoms to be knocked free into the air.

Re:History repeating, sort of

[meshko]

a Soviet expatriate/dissidentBulgarian For a death this rapid, he'd pretty much have had to ingest it.Three weeks is nto that rapid.

Re:History repeating, sort of

[Chicane-UK]

Not sure if its mentioned in TFA (have to admit I didn't look) but the reports from the BBC this week, about his poisoning (and before his death) stated that he'd met two men for lunch at a Sushi bar and began to feel seriously ill a few hours after eating there.

Not sure if they would be able to put polonium into sushi without him realising? Not even sure what it is or how large a dose you'd need to kill someone! :|

Re:History repeating, sort of

[Anonymous Coward]

The maximum allowable body burden for ingested polonium is only 1100 becquerels (0.03 microcurie), which is equivalent to a particle weighing only 6.8 × 10-12 gram.

Re:History repeating, sort of

[Phanatic1a]

It is for a death from radiological causes. To kill someone in mere days requires obscenely high doses of radiation, we're talking prompt-criticality accidents. Slotin took 2100 rems in an instant, enough to noticeably heat the air in the room, and he still lasted for 9 days.

Polonium

[no-body]

Polonium-210 is very dangerous to handle in even milligram or microgram amounts, and special equipment and strict control is necessary. Damage arises from the complete absorption of the energy of the alpha particle into tissue.

The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 1011 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10-11 microcuries/cm3.

From: there

Soluble in acidic environment.
Apparently he was repeatedly invited by by an unkown russian person to drink tea....
A little sourness in tea with a few milligram of metal dissolved.

What an awful headline

[Tim C]

He wasn't poisoned by radiation in the UK, he was poisoned in the UK by radiation.

The former implies that it was the radiation present in the UK that poisoned him; the latter makes it clear that he happened to be in the UK when he was poisoned by radiation.

Re:Polonium-210? What legitimate uses does it have

[Dunbal]

If he was dying, don't you think he'd have dropped a hint so that doctors might be able to treat him?

      You can't save a patient that has this level of radiation poisoning. Impossible. Maybe he knew it, so he decided to play for the maximum political advantage. If people can fly aircraft into buildings, they can do this. Anyway it's just a creepy thought, probably not true at all - where would he get it? It will be interesting to see what the cause of the radiation is at the sushi bar. So long as it's not coming from the sewer ;)

Re:History repeating, sort of

[LWATCDR]

While funny it probably isn't a real problem.
From the wikipedia the "safe" body load of Po210 is a massive 6.8*10^-12 grams.
I doubt that you would have to ingest very much of it to kill you.

Re:Devotion to one's cause

[Mateorabi]

Perhaps I am an idiot.

Yes, but a useful one.

Litvinenko's statement before he died

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are doing all they can for me, the British police who are pursuing my case with vigour and professionalism and are watching over me and my family.

I would like to thank the British government for taking me under their care. I am honoured to be a British citizen.

I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight.

I thank my wife Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her and our son knows no bounds.

But as I lie here I can distinctly hear the beating of wings of the angel of death.

I may be able to give him the slip but I have to say my legs do not run as fast as I would like.

I think, therefore, that this may be the time to say one or two things to the person responsible for my present condition.

You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed.

You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilised value.

You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilised men and women.

You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life.

May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6180262.stm

I'd believe it was upon Putin's order if...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd really believe it was Putin who ordered someone's assasination if it was Mr. Berezowski who was all of a sudden dead... Seriously this guy has been a thorn in Putin's ass for much longer than either the journalist (of whom no one really knew or read anything by in Russia before her death) or this Litvinenko guy...

I could of course believe that perhaps some secret service was involved... but believing that everything in Russia is done upon Putin's order is like saying that Bush is directly responsible for every law that is passed and every corporate deal in the US...

Anyways, Litvinenko is directly linked to Berezowski who is directly linked to the Chechen mafia (criminals aka terrorists)... so I wouldn't be too surprised if it's rather that group of people who are directly involved in his death. Btw, I still find it amazing that one of the Chechen terrorist leaders, who was directly responsible for recruiting and training British citizens to become terrorists on Chechen territory is still walking freely around London, especially in the post-London-tube-bombing situation. The guy's name is Zakaev and he is often shown on British TV ;)... admittedly the Russian's did mess up the extradition request... but alas... with all the hard talk about the anti-terrorist war from Tony Blair it still seems very strange.

Re:History repeating, sort of

[QRDeNameland]

According to this, a grain of sand can range from 0.30 mg to 13 mg. That's milligrams: 1/1,000ths of grams.

The quoted safe dose of Po-210 is 6.8 picograms, which is trillionths (1/1,000,000,000,000) of grams.

Without taking the differences of density between sand and Po-210 into account (quartz is 2.65, Po is over 9), that amount is in the order of one-billionth of a grain of sand.

Re:History repeating, sort of

[kravlor]

The problem is that Po-210 is a potent alpha emitter. Since these guys are kicking off 5 MeV alphas, you will get a huge dose localized to a few cm from the parent nucleus. In the digestive system, you'll quickly tear things apart, killing the stem cells of the intestinal tract. It gets worse if absorbed into the bloodstream and the bone marrow.

While I'm not a toxicologist, I am a nuclear physicist; one of the foremost rules of radiation safety is to avoid ingesting alpha sources (or any other source, for God's sake) for precisely this reason. FWIW, alpha sources are one of the safer things to work with, for exactly the same reason that they're so bad for you if ingested: a few cm of shielding is sufficient to stop the penetrating alpha particles.

Ludicrously Complex Murder

[MrSteveSD]

The Russian government has often assassinated enemies with stupidly obvious methods like exotic poisons delivered through micro-machines pellets. The whole point of killing with these methods is to send a signal and leave little doubt who was responsible.

However, killing him has probably backfired since more people know about the FSB bombing allegations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bo mbings#FSB_involvement) than before. The allegations seem quite credible. It's very much like a 911 conspiracy, i.e. Stage a terrorist outrage as an excuse to start a war. However, unlike 911 conspiracies, you find that you are not rolling your eyes with this one.

Re:Reading the artcle......

[rbanffy]

As far as killing him of leukemia 6 months from now, this would not be enough to contain any information he migh have - 6 months is time enough to write a biography.

If this is a case of silencing him because he was about to disclose something really nasty, why not run over him with a truck or hit him with a falling brick or, even better, making him vanish without a trace? That's nothing a boat and a pair of cement shoes couldn't achieve. Although it's unclear if anyone was ever murdered with cement shoes, I could bet some money it's more frequent than with Polonium.

If I am ever to have information people would kill me to avoid spreading, I would spread it as fast and wide as I could, leaving my potential killers scrambling for damage control and lower my value as a target.

Of course, they might kill me later, for revenge, but later is better than sooner.

But remaining a high value target is something really dumb to do.

rarity

[JustNiz]

The Russians were stupid to use polonium-210. Its so rare and hard to get, it proves a government did it.

You need massive resources like a ton of uranium and a nuclear proccesing plant to get 100 micrograms of polonium. It also has a half-life of 138 days so you don't have too long to use it either.

I guess they were completely banking on the fact that no-one would think of looking for it in a post-mortem. Now the Brits found it, the Russians are completely in the sh1t.

A Letter from Litvinenko's Bedside

[tulimulta]

The Finnish Newspaper Helsingin Sanomat published yesterday a letter from the Russian film director Andrei Nekrasov. (Coincidentally, mr. Putin was also visiting Finland yesterday as part of the Russia-EU summit.) The letter is a scathing analysis of the present-day Russian society.

Re:Reading the artcle......

[shutdown -p now]

Which they do here in Russia nowadays.

But no, it's not totalitarian. The fact that I'm - a Russian, living in Russia - is able to write it, and noone will go after me for this, proves otherwise. Nah, it's not even anywhere near China yet. It's just your typical African-style third-world country with utterly corrupt but formally democratic government (and if you look at various freedom, life quality, wealth distribution & corruption indices, that's where Russia is today, somewhere in the company of Ghana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe). Noone cares what you say in general, until your words start to inconvenience those in power - for that they must at the very least be heard by someone who cares, so kitchen talk and random ranting on the Net (like this post) are not enough to make the government interested in you. But when you are a journalist or otherwise notable figure with access to mass media channels, and your words are heard and listened to... that's when they try to shut you up by any means necessary. Jail & assassination are the last resort measures in this game, though by no means unheard of.

Re:SPY?

[hughk]

Along with the other oligarchs, Berezovsky did some very unfortunate things. Many Russians say "he is Jewish" and leave it at that. However, the 'Siloviki' just seem to be replacing the old Oligarchs with new ones, in the process reducing any notion of private ownership. Before Putin, the view held by many in the Russian markets was that the Oligarchs had stolen their bit during privatisation, but overall they needed things to settle down for them to realise their investments. In such an environment, ordinary people could have investments, insurance policies, pension funds or whatever. The attack on Yukos and Khordokovsky was a lesson that Russia wasn't ready for transparency in business or government.

Actually it remains a lot cheaper but only if you go direct. Someone who is going to get a stand at CeBIT is generally to expensive, i.e., a large amount of cost is the payoff because your company is big enough to be 'noticed' and there is probably also a local company taking a hefty margin (yes I know some Russian/German companies). India is extremely expensive for an onshore/offshore project, the major vendors ask a blended rate of around 500 Eur/day for on-site and still 300 or so Eur a day for a senior person in India. However, despite the infrastructure issues in India, it is perceived to be a much lower risk by major customer, particularly in the area of financial systems.

People die all the time in India, from starvation or whatever. There is even terrorism as well. However, it is seen as being a much safer bet than Russia. High profile assassinations make people uncomfortable. So does the fact that the army/MVD can hang around Pulkovo airport and arbitrarily and illegally 'fine' foreigners with impunity.