Word: litvinenko
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Dates: during 2006-2006
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...Litvinenko broke that promise. With Putin having succeeded Yeltsin as President, Litvinenko and his family fled to London in October 2000--shortly after Berezovsky, who was later charged in Russia with fraud, had left for Britain. Litvinenko went to work for the billionaire and lived in a house owned by him. Both agitated against Putin, Berezovsky by financing human-rights and opposition groups and Litvinenko by producing two books furiously critical of the new President. Litvinenko, it is fair to say, didn't like Putin. Last summer he claimed in a letter posted on the Internet that the President...
Putin, says Alexei Kondaurov, a former KGB general who is now a maverick Duma deputy, is known for keeping score and for a long memory. So the idea that he would want an infuriating gadfly like Litvinenko to disappear is not beyond reason. But the President's defenders scoff at the idea that he might have been involved in Litvinenko's death. Putin, they say, had no need to get rid of Litvinenko; the exile was an irrelevant crank. Milton Bearden, a former CIA spy in Moscow, as well as other experienced intelligence hands, agrees it would be nuts...
...Putin, who might want Litvinenko dead? Plenty. Russian Mafia bosses whose networks he was still prying into, for example, or rogue FSB officers who had been paid to rub him out by those who wanted to hurt Berezovsky. Perhaps the culprit was someone who wanted to frame Putin, or a member of the many factions maneuvering to succeed him when his term expires in 2008. One particularly dark theory making the rounds in Moscow was that Litvinenko organized his own death in a bizarre politically motivated suicide. Julia Svetlichnaja, a Russian postgraduate student who met with Litvinenko several times over...
...website of United Nuclear, which sells isotopes for use in research labs, it would take about $1 million, 15,000 purchases of the largest unlicensed amount and some fancy lab work to scrape together a lethal dose. (The British Health Protection Agency says the dose that killed Litvinenko was at least 10 times as high as that needed to kill...
...retrospect, it would have been a lot less trouble for someone to push Litvinenko under a bus than to feed him polonium. But it's likely his poisoners did not anticipate the brouhaha his death would cause. "I believe this was a botched operation," says Litvinenko's friend Alexander Goldfarb, who helped him escape from Russia and runs the Berezovsky-funded International Foundation for Civil Liberties in New York City. Without the intervention of Britain's nuclear-bomb lab, the cause of death would have remained shrouded. Boris Zhuykov, chief of the radioisotope laboratory at the Nuclear Research Institute...