Word: litvinenko
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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Alexander Litvinenko didn't mince words. On Oct. 19, at a public meeting in London, he introduced himself as a former Russian kgb officer, and proceeded to accuse President Vladimir Putin of sanctioning the murder two weeks earlier of a crusading Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya. Litvinenko, who fell out with his erstwhile employers after claiming they had ordered him to assassinate Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and high Russian official of the Yeltsin years, now exiled, had met Politkovskaya on several occasions. At one of their last meetings, he said, she had told him about threats she'd been receiving...
...moment of high drama, but it paled beside what happened next. Last Thursday, Litvinenko himself died in a London hospital, after having ingested a "major dose" of the radioactive toxin polonium-210 that destroyed his immune system, according to Britain's Health Protection Agency. Scotland Yard said that traces of polonium-210 - which is so rare and volatile that producing quantities large enough to kill requires access to a high-security nuclear laboratory - were found at a sushi restaurant called Itsu in Piccadilly where Litvinenko had eaten lunch on the day he got sick. Traces of the isotope were also...