Slashdot Mirror
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."
......found this curious comment:
"Mr Putin himself has said Mr Litvinenko's death was a tragedy, but he saw no "definitive proof" it was a "violent death"."
Clearly the term "violent death" has a different definition in Russian than it does in English.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Shades of Georgi Markov, a Soviet expatriate/dissident who was also assassinated in London. He was stabbed in the leg with a special spring-loaded umbrella that subcutaneously injected a metal pellet contaminated with ricin. They didn't even find the pellet until he was already dead, and it took some work to find out just what had killed him.
I wonder how they got the polonium into him. For a death this rapid, he'd pretty much have had to ingest it.
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.
Find free books.
Hands up who's not worried by this?
Lots of talk of what Al Qaeda might do, but these are the people with their hands on thousands of nukes, much of the energy supplies and they are now poisoning people with radioactive isotopes because they say they are scheming murdering psychopaths.
Do we really need another bunch of homicidal f*ckwits in the world?
He's been labelled a heckler, when he may well have a genuine issue at hand. The same thing, perhaps a little more dramatic, happened at a press conference regarding the demise of the Kursk.
When Russia (yes, even modern-day Russia) gets its hands near an investigation, the result is usually indeterminate or irrelevant, never indisputable.
WANRING: This warning is misspelt.
Other than in nuclear weapons?
I don't understand why of all things, they were using Polonium-210 to kill him. Since that's not exactly something you buy over the counter, wouldn't there be "better" ways of killing him by poisoning without drawing as much attention? Only about 100 grams of Polonium, any isotope, is estimated to be produced yearly and it's extremely rare in nature. It's hard to imagine a better way of drawing attention to the government.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Russia's actions are much more appalling because they are done in such openness, with such indifference to how easily it can be traced back to the state, underscoring their government's brazenness in doing whatever the heck they feel like doing. The list includes jailing an oil tycoon and using a fake company -- with shown ties to the government and billions of dollars that it gathered seemingly out of nowhere, to bid for the oil company, when sell it back to the state for pennies on the dollar. Or cutting off natural gas to entire countries in the midst of the coldest winter in years.
It is amazing to me how nothing has changed in Russia since the cold war, the KGB, Solidarity, etc. Russia is the big bully of Europe and there doesn't appear anyone that can stand up to them, and there's definitely too many business/trade ties for other governments to use any strong tactics to chastise Putin.
to cover up most dishes: Curry. I had so much curry as a child I now need it to survive. Mmmm, kidney pie.
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.
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.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Sounds like all our Russian "friends" needed to do was to visit the local camera store's going-out-of-business sale.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
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
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Wrong answer. This may be intended as a very public warning to other possible defectors and traitors not to follow in Litvinenko's footsteps. The same deal as the (apocryphal?) story Oleg Penkovsky (GRU double agent in the 60ies) being burnt alive and a film of the execution being shown to all new KGB recruits to discourage disloyalty.
-b.
Well, you only live twice.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Interesting question - what if he's found to have some other terminal disease at the autopsy? What if he knew he was going to die within a few months anyway and decided to suicide in a rather spectacular manner that would embarrass the fuck out of the Russian government? Wild speculation here of course.
-b.
Not under Russian law maybe, but British law tends to frown upon murder on British soil. If whoever did it is caught, they'll be spending a long stretch in a small dark hotel room...
-b.
Offcourse it might just as well be a setup. Someone who wants to make it look like it was Putin.
Frankly I don't know enough about the guy to make a guess wich one is the case but the use of an obvious method of execution is not that hard to explain. Because if it was Putin then so what. Will britain go to war over this? Even a mere trade war? Most likely not. If it was Putin this was a show of power. Basically saying,"we are still here and don't you forget it."
Offcourse the other option, that this is a setup to frame Putin is less likely but far more intresting. Russia is screwed up enough that Putin has lots of enemies in Russia itself and with its security system all messed up someone getting hold of a rare material is not that unimaginable.
So the question is, why would Putin want this guy dead so badly (more acuratly why would Putin want the world to know that he wanted this guy dead and succeeded) OR who wants to make it look like Putin killed this guy.
Ah, were is 007 when you need him?
I could have thought of 200 better ways to off someone discretely just by watching the Sopranos or The Wire. With all the poisons in the world, they pick an exotic and rare poison yet whose symptoms are ubiquitous and unique. What is the cover story? He moonlights as a nuclear technician? I think the spies have watch too many James Bond films. It would have been better to have taken him to an abandon house, clipped him, and then pour lye over him to removed the evidence. Or here is a better thought, stop doing bad things. Russia should try to be more civil and stop offing dissidents and take a more American approach- brand them unpatriotic.
You don't have to be smart to use a Mac, you just have to be smart enough to buy one
I know you're making a joke but this isn't as far fetched as I bet you think it is....It COULD have been done that way. The CEDE for ingested polonium (comitted efective dose equivalent) is an astounding 2,000 mREM/microcurie or 2,000 REM/millicurie (a lethal dose of radiation to 50% of people is only ~500 rem). He would need to ingest only .5-1 millicurie of Po-210 to get a lethal dose and each anti-static brush contains how much Po? .2-.5 millicuries per brush apparently.... I'm not saying that's how it happened, I'm sure the KGB has access to far larger amounts of Po that they would have used but it does give an idea of just how incredibly tiny an amount is needed to do harm. Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of .5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251 .shtml?id=1760111n
There's a video there of Putin kissing the 5 year old boy's stomach. This started a lot of speculation and I have read that the KGB gathered video from a hotel room proving that he was from years ago. When Putin headed the KGB all these videos obviously disappeared. There is stuff about it on teh web if anyone needs to do some research. I suspect it's true.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
They did try a Geiger counter but it wouldn't detect alpha radiation. As alpha radiation poisoning is so uncommon and unheard of it wasn't an obvious option, also as alpha radiation wouldn't even escape out of his body through his organs and skin the only way to detect it was if traces of it left his body through other methods - i.e. his urine which is where they eventually found it.
Yes, but a useful one.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Barbarians compared to the US of course who indulge in no such activites..
Like rigging elections, assasinating democractically elected heads of state they don't agree with, invading countries for suggesting they might prefer to sell oil in Euros thus causing a huge run on the already weak dollar, selling arms and torture equipment to countries with appalling human rights records, wire-tapping their own citizens on a scale undreamed of by the most autocratic of regimes, collaborating with despots for profit, operating an institutionally rascist judicial systm, atempting to deny women rights fundamentally accepted as basic by the entire western world, accepting graft as a proxy for politic.. yadda yadda yadda..
I'm not saying the rest of the western world's any better.. the brits, the french, the israelis.. they're all doing their bits to help out f ck it all up.. but really.. it's the sheer bare-faced hypocrisy of the US that disappoints the most.. still.. we seem to be growing up slowly..
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6180262.stm
What if rogue clowns from some other planet drove their flying space armadillo to the UK, abducted this guy and used an anal probe to implant the polonium in his ass?
Seriously, have you never heard of Occam's Razor?
I've seen a few posts here asking "why use such an obvious method of killing someone?"
The answer is: it's very, very far from obvious. The mere fact that it's taken so long to work out what the poison was indicates how subtle Polonium poisoning is.
1. Based on the Wikipedia entry for Polonium, the dosage required is incredibly small. We're not talking milligrams, here; we're talking micrograms, or less. Just detecting such a tiny quantity distributed throughout the victim's body is going to be incredibly hard.
2. The poison won't produce discernable radiation outside the victim's body, either, because alpha radiation is so readily absorbed by tissue. (That's also what makes it such a good poison, of course.)
3. The thing with poisons is that you have to actually look for them. Polonium is such an unlikely poison - given its rarity and inherent handling hazards - that even considering it is far-fetched. The fact that the victim's urine contained helium was the only clue the pathologists had, and I think they deserve a huge amount of credit for getting from that result to polonium as the cause.
What truly puzzles me here is why exactly any secret service such as the FSB would be stupid enough to poison some Kremlin critic with a really hard to acquire substance such as Polonium. It should be assumed that the British WILL find out what killed Litvinenko, and when it is something as obscure as Polonium, it's got to be the Russians. You're practically implicating yourself by being too good at what you do.
The guy is far more valuable to his cause as a confirmed martyr than some loud-mouthed expat living in Britain. If I were Putin, I probably wouldn't bother, and if I wanted to bother, I would want it to look like a traffic accident or a random mugging. The tinfoil hat guy in me actually is willing to believe this was a CIA job that wants to implicate the FSB. Let's face it, if you want to make Russia look bad, this is what you'd do.
Unless, of course, I REALLY wanted to make a point of Russia's reach, but in that case, Putin's guys are simply miscalculating...
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Russia's current president is an ex kgb president. he is a thug, as well as the big-money who is now running the country are mobs, mafia and thugs, who are suppressing russian people and being harmful not only to russian citizens and to the world.
i see russia more dangerous than north korea while mafia placed presidents/governments, especially ones with kgb or such background at the helm.
Read radical news here
Even a THOUSAND TIMES the lethal dose of .5 mCi would be a mere tenth of a milligram.
At 9196 kg/m^3 ~= 9 mg / mm^3, that's about a hundredth of a cubic millimeter, assuming it was given in elemental form.
The sheer quantity of alpha radiation it produces also explains why it's used in satellites - "The power density of polonium is unique and made it attractive as a power source. One pound of polonium-210 occupies a volume of approximately 3 cubic inches and produces heat at the rate of 3.6 x 10^8 British Thermal Units (BTUs) per minute or about 64 kilowatts of electric power."
For some synthetic elements (like Pu, Np, etc.) the abundance of isotopes in the material can be an identifier of the production site, and in some cases, of the particular reactor that made the material. Is anyone here enough of a nuclear synthetic chemist to know if what is nominally Po210 actually has enough other minor Po isotopes that one might identify the production site by the mix, or secondarily, by looking at the decay product mix?
I believe in this case Mr Putin used term "nasilstvennaya smert'" which basically means someone else killed that person. While "nasilstvennaya" has the same root as "nasilie" = violence, the meaning is "forced upon someone" versus "estestvennaya" (which would mean "natural causes" i.e. old age or an illness). Means of inflicting premature death could be violet (hacked with a saw) or not-so-violent (sleeping pills poisoning) but in both cases it would be an "unnatural cause of death"/"nasilstvennaya smert'".
Of course it's way more fun to use "violent" in articles, as it paints Russian President as a fierce person who doesn't think that deaths not involving excessive violence are worthy of an investigation.
Frankly I personally don't know what to think about this whole story. It's some sort of James Bond in real life. If it was really an evil plot, why did they use highly exotic means? Why not just shoot him during "robbery" or "accidentally" run him over with a car? To give him enough time to make an accusation? Did perpetrators they take into account his hate toward Russian government and simply used him for their own purposes? Or they knew we'd think that and reality is even more twisted? I don't think he'd do it on purpose -- sacrificing one's life is a very high price for a political statement to make.
So my only option is to wait for the final results of the autopsy and then hope that source of the radioactive material will be found quickly, to prevent any other radiation poisonings.
Hyperom.com
The Kremlin Pedophile
By Alexander Litvinenko
A few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin walked from the Big Kremlin Palace to his Residence. At one of the Kremlin squares, the president stopped to chat with the tourists. Among them was a boy aged 4 or 5.
'What is your name?' Putin asked.
'Nikita,' the boy replied.
Putin kneed, lifted the boy's T-shirt and kissed his stomach.
The world public is shocked. Nobody can understand why the Russian president did such a strange thing as kissing the stomach of an unfamiliar small boy.
The explanation may be found if we look carefully at the so-called "blank spots" in Putin's biography.
After graduating from the Andropov Institute, which prepares officers for the KGB intelligence service, Putin was not accepted into the foreign intelligence. Instead, he was sent to a junior position in KGB Leningrad Directorate. This was a very unusual twist for a career of an Andropov Institute's graduate with fluent German. Why did that happen with Putin?
Because, shortly before his graduation, his bosses learned that Putin was a pedophile. So say some people who knew Putin as a student at the Institute.
The Institute officials feared to report this to their own superiors, which would cause an unpleasant investigation. They decided it was easier just to avoid sending Putin abroad under some pretext. Such a solution is not unusual for the secret services.
Many years later, when Putin became the FSB director and was preparing for presidency, he began to seek and destroy any compromising materials collected against him by the secret services over earlier years. It was not difficult, provided he himself was the FSB director. Among other things, Putin found videotapes in the FSB Internal Security Directorate, which showed him having sex with some underage boys.
Interestingly, the video was recorded in the same conspiratorial flat in Polyanka Street in Moscow where Russian Prosecutor-General Yuri Skuratov was secretly video-taped with two prostitutes. Later, in the famous scandal, Putin (on Roman Abramovich's instructions) blackmailed Skuratov with these tapes and tried to persuade the Prosecutor-General to resign. In that conversation, Putin mentioned to Skuratov that he himself was also secretly video-taped making sex at the same bed. (But of course, he did not tell it was pedophilia rather than normal sex.) Later, Skuratov wrote about this in his book Variant Drakona.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
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.
o 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.
However, killing him has probably backfired since more people know about the FSB bombing allegations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_b
Because shooting a spy with a gun does not instill a new fear into the population. Nasty stuff happens day in and day out, all over the world, but I'm always curious to see what the media wants to emphasize, and try to poke at what the motives must be. Spies are killed left and right and you never get to know about it. The important part here is that da man through his media channels decided to make a story about it, meaning it will probably have a desired effect. One effect I can think of is the "proliferation" of nuclear poisons and materials, giving you another reason to get stripsearched at an airport. It used to be that cops just tossed a small bag of white powder in your car, and you were caught redhanded, possessing drugs. You can swear you never saw that thing in your car, right, all pepople in prison swear they are innocent. But the penalties for finding powder on you are only nominal, there needs to be something that automatically takes you out of circulation for good, without parole. Soon you'll see people on "cops" caught carrying 2 mg of polonium! Wee! And the law enforcement is ready to counter the threat for your protection! It's like IE7 with "anti-phishing" measures! Gotta have some excuse, something latest and greates and novel to push something on you, getting stripsearched for drug possession is so old-fashioned and boring, but hey, not you'll be "phished" for polonium! Wee! That's the new vogue to get arrested for!
I think someone might notice when you call up United Nuclear and try to order 1,000 of their 0.1 uCi Polonium sources. (And I'm not even sure if 1,000 of them would be enough to poison someone. That's a really minute amount they're selling.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yes, I have heart of people visiting the "liquidators"(people who were sent to clean up the mess) from Chernobyl. Some had gotten so much radiation, that they got cooked alive -- their flesh had lost all feeling was just coming off the bone like you see on an overdone turkey. Pretty sick, doctors just prescribed wine and vodka and waited for them to die. All my mom's plants on the balcony turned yellow, I wonder if my children would have to heads...
And what can you or the rest of the world do about it? Nothing. And thats the point.
This is a viral signature. You are now infected!
After heading for a democracy, Russia is falling back into old ways. When I was there one woman earnestly asked me what I thought of Putin, and: "He is a strong leader isn't he"? Perhaps there is something in the Russian pysche that wants a strong leader more than a moral leader.
Their treatment of Georgia and other nearby states is not good lately, and this suggests that there are powerful and nasty organisations still calling shots there.
Please, Russians, don't go down the same road again!
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
BTW communists were not gentleman - they might appear to follow agreement for their propaganda purposes. Communists are gone (mostly) now and there is no reason Putin would pursue old days agreements.
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.
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.
See my journal, I write things there
I think perhaps in all the very, very politically correct talk about how the United States is really just the same morally as other countries like Syria, Uganda and Russia is how incredibly _evil_ the KGB was/is. It is just not politically correct to say bad things about the ex-Soviet Union.
However, having been to Berlin a few days after the Wall came down, and having talked to people from the former Soviet Union, I can tell you that this remote academic theorizing is so much ear's wax, and some people really need to get outside more. In some ways it is fitting that the last of the ugly huge Lenin posters, etc, are by Chernobyl.
Pretty much everyone knows that PC conceals truth. What's the truth?
Putin rose to head the KGB because he's the chief scum of some extremely evil scum. They were the enforcement arm of a political system that killed more people, and enslaved more people, than any other this world has ever known.
The Soviet Union, which crashed Dec. 25 1991, has become a Third World country. I have friends who have left that place because they were under death threats to pay up or be killed. Another friend tried to set up an export business but was stopped by the Russian Mafia. The Museum of Soviet Spaceflight was burned to the ground because it could not pay off two rival "protection" gangs. The Buran "Space Shuttle Clone" sits in a park as a plaything.
So, do I think Putin would off this guy with polonium? Yep. It had a good chance of not being detected.
Has the KGB offed other people who gave them a bad time in England? Yep. They whacked Georgi Markov in 1978. He had a radio show that intensely annoyed them.
Did the KGB try to whack the Pope with a Bulgarian hitman? Yep. The East Germans were notified of this pre-whack try to cover themselves; this was found in their files.
It is within a pattern of consistent behavior for Putin and his KGB/NKVD/FSB buddies to whack this guy. People on this list are supposed to be rational. Pattern recognizers. If a Unix system kept popping the same output at the same time of day each day, you'd say, "Cron is doing something". If the KGB keeps killing people, you'd say, "Gee, that KGB keeps killing people."
But amazingly, given the evidence, people keep saying, "Why, no, that KGB has changed from its institutional roots, from the sociopath Laventina Beria under Stalin to now, and is now peaceful, cuddly, and furry."
Crap. They're killers.
-- thank you, have a nice day.
David Small