Word: litvinenko
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Litvinenko got sick the evening of Nov. 1, when alpha particles were destroying the lining of his gut. As he began to suspect poison, he focused on two meetings he had earlier that day. One was at a sushi bar in central London with Mario Scaramella, 36, an Italian lawyer and, like Litvinenko, a man drawn to the world of secret information and conspiracy theories. The second meeting was in the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel, near the U.S. embassy, with a group of Russian businessmen with whom Litvinenko was apparently hatching business ventures in Britain. "Alexander said both...
...last week his level of poisoning and other evidence exculpated him of any suspicion. Instead, the trail of polonium was entangling the group of Russians at the Pine Bar. All seven bartenders on duty that day tested positive for the substance, at levels approaching those found in members of Litvinenko's family, implying they had inhaled it soon after its release--possibly from the vapor given off by a drink into which it had been slipped. The Russians who met Litvinenko in the bar included Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard who had met Litvinenko in the 1990s when serving...
When Lugovoy learned that British authorities were investigating Litvinenko's poisoning, he volunteered for an interview at the British embassy in Moscow. Polonium was later found in the embassy room, and in lots of other places Lugovoy had visited: on planes he had flown between Moscow and London in October; in five rooms at the Sheraton Park Lane hotel, where he had stayed; and in a fourth-floor room at the Millennium Hotel he is said to have used on the day Litvinenko was poisoned. Finding polonium in a hotel Lugovoy had used on a previous trip to London prompted...