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

Reading the artcle......

[8127972]

......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.

Re:Reading the artcle......

[Anonymous Coward]

Or more likely, he's just not being honest.

Mr Putin himself has said Mr Litvinenko's death was a tragedy

Mr. Litvinenko was apparantly more than your average former KGB agent - he's accused Putin of pedophilia, among other things. Even if Putin weren't behind this poisoning (which he almost certainly is), he probably wouldn't consider Mr. Litvinenko's death a tragedy at all.

Isn't it strange how Putin's most vocal critics inside Russia are just dropping like flies...

Re:Reading the artcle......

[Anonymous Coward]

This was said before the postmortem and before Po poisoning was officially confirmed.

Before that the UK medics went through a list of at least 3-4 different hypothesis each of which proved to be loads of bull. Tallium, radioactive Tallium, strange objects in his intestines, etc you name it.

So at the point where Putin said it nothing was known yet. I have not heard what he said in Russian so it is also quite likely that some nuances have been lost in translation (like a "yet" at the end of the sentence).

As far as you noticing that his idea of violent death differs from our idea of violent death that is a definite. He would not have had his past job if this was not so.

It is quite interesting that AFAIK this is the first high profile poisoning with radioactive substance. Considering the guaranteed lethality and obvious ineptitude of the medics in diagnosing it I am surprised that this does not happen more often. Actually, probably it does, but using much smaller doses which end up in effects indistinguishable from cancer. If the dose was a small fraction of what he got he would have died quietly from leukemia 6 months from now. Whoever killed him wanted to make a point and also wanted the fingers to be pointed at the usual suspects.

Which makes me on a second thought post anonymously :-)

Re:Reading the artcle......

[Anonymous Coward]

We have always been allied with Russia. We have always been at war with Islamic fundamentalists.

Re:Reading the artcle......

[goddidit]

Minitrue mark the post doubleplusfunny.

History repeating, sort of

[Phanatic1a]

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.

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.

Re:History repeating, sort of

[cmd]

New York Times: Mr. Litvinenko, 43, a prominent opponent of the Kremlin, was hospitalized earlier this month. He said that he fell ill after having lunch at a sushi restaurant with a man who said he had information about the killing of Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who had made her name as a critic of the government's policies in Chechnya.

I read another article in which Litvinenko suspected the poison was in the tea served to him.

Also, Litvinenko and Putin have a long history:
New York Times: (from the archives, paid registration required)

November 21, 1998
Report of Plot to Kill Tycoon Leads Yeltsin to Call Inquiry
By MICHAEL WINES

President Boris N. Yeltsin ordered an inquiry today into spectacular charges leveled earlier this week -- so far without evidence -- that Russia's equivalent of the F.B.I. plotted to kill one of the country's most influential tycoons.

The tycoon is Boris A. Berezovsky, an oil magnate and director of Russia's biggest television network, who was a leading supporter of Mr. Yeltsin during the last presidential campaign in 1996.

Mr. Berezovsky, who is still alive, released a letter last week asserting that the Federal Security Service, a spinoff of the old Soviet K.G.B. that is responsible for domestic law enforcement, plotted last winter to murder him.

On Tuesday the source of Mr. Berezovsky's information, a Security Service colonel named Aleksandr Litvinenko, called a news conference to elaborate on the accusation and warn that a rogue element was running wild within the agency.

...

The list of very prominent people who once opposed Putin and suffered extremely nasty reversals of fortune is growing conspicuously long:

• Life sentence to a Siberian gulag [Mikhail Khodorkovsky]
• Slow, painful, and irreversible death from radiation poisoning [Litvinenko]
• Execution (hitman style) on one's doorstep [Anna Politkovskaya]
• Execution leaving a soccer game [Andrei Kozlov]
• Execution at one's dacha [Enver Ziganshin]
• Dioxin poisoning (nearly fatal) [Viktor A. Yushchenko]

Ironically, an interview of Litvinenko from December 15 2004 included this prophetic quote:

"The view inside our agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol," said Alexander V. Litvinenko, who served in the K.G.B. and its Russian successor, the Federal Security Service, from 1988 to 1999 and now lives in London. "It's not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool."

Former USSR = nutbag central?

[0jjjjjjjjjj0]

It will be interesting to see how this investigation concludes. Some dismiss a lot of what comes out at these press conferences as simple 'nutbag syndrome', however well-founded their claims may be. See, from the article ...

As the conference drew to a close, a heckler interrupted saying he was from Ukraine and had also been the victim of poisoning.

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.

On 18 August, Nadezhda Tylik mother of Kursk submariner Lt. Sergei Tylik, produced an intense emotional outburst in the middle of an in-progress news briefing about Kursk's fate. After attempts to quiet her failed, a nurse injected her with a sedative and she was removed from the room, incapacitated. The event, caught on film, caused further criticism of the government's response to both the disaster, and how the government handled public criticism of said response.

When Russia (yes, even modern-day Russia) gets its hands near an investigation, the result is usually indeterminate or irrelevant, never indisputable.

Answers to the question...

[TheOriginalRevdoc]

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.

Yes, it can be a translation problem

[saikou]

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.