Word: litvinenko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Alexander Litvinenko was buried as he had lived, in a storm. There was rain, hail and a tornado near Highgate Cemetery in north London on the day his lead-lined coffin was lowered into a plot a few yards from that of another dissident who had sought refuge in Britain, Karl Marx. Before the burial, there was a memorial service at a mosque. Several close friends said Litvinenko had converted to Islam a few days before he died, in a kind of atonement for atrocities Russia (and perhaps Litvinenko himself) had committed in Chechnya, although another doubted any conversion...
...dead man in the Highgate Cemetery started feeling ill on Nov. 1. The London doctors who attended Litvinenko's bedside quickly suspected that some kind of radioactive agent was causing his decline. His hair was falling out, his athlete's body was shriveling, his bone marrow was failing, just as if he had been one of the firemen called to the burning reactor at Chernobyl. But gamma spectrometers found nothing unusual in his blood or urine. As doctors ruled out a slew of increasingly obscure toxins and bugs, the patient's condition worsened. In desperation, the police sent his urine...
Murder is a firmly established tradition in Russian battles over money and power. So, the suspicion in Moscow is that the recent murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and former KGB operative Alexander Litvinenko - as well as the alleged attempt on former prime minister and economic-reform mastermind Yegor Gaidar - result from domestic clan warfare. Russians are quite accustomed to seeing assassination used as an instrument to silence an opponent or redistribute assets, and over a dozen major energy-corporation and banking executives have been killed in the past couple of months alone. What is different about the Litvinenko and Gaidar...
...Litvinenko murder investigation, in fact, may have a profound effect on the image of President Vladimir Putin in the West - much like the Chechen war of 1999 did, or the dismembering the oil company Yukos and the imprisonment of its CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, or the Beslan terror tragedy. Each time, Putin chose a course of action that benefited his regime in short term, but deeply hurt his country's interests in the long term...
...Britain, horrified that a foe of the Kremlin could be murdered with a radioactive isotope that has left traces all over London, has vowed to pursue the Litvinenko investigation wherever "the police take it," regardless of diplomatic sensitivities. However, once the men from Scotland Yard landed in Moscow, Russian prosecutor-general Yuri Chaika bluntly spelled out the limits of the British inquiry: It's the Russians who ask questions - the British just sit tight and watch. And should any Russians be discovered to have been involved, he said, they would not be extradited...