Word: litvinenko
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...Litvinenko's fate. On Nov. 23, a few hours after the scientists isolated what was causing his body to disintegrate, he succumbed. His was not the quiet, inexplicable demise that a poisoner usually seeks. Instead, those alpha particles, which were shown to come from the rare isotope polonium 210, opened a box of mysteries that have grabbed the world's attention for weeks and turned a gruesome death into the center of a global manhunt and a potential row between Russia and the rest of the world...
...Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. Russian officials have denied that as a malicious provocation. Not surprisingly, Britain is being punctilious about amassing sufficient evidence before it points a finger in any direction. But if some shadowy figures close to the Kremlin turn out to be responsible for Litvinenko's death, it would be the most astonishing indictment of just how ruthless the modern Russian state...
...that, as yet, remains unproved. Meanwhile, a slew of whodunit theories are jostling for prominence. Following an autopsy that spurred the police to treat Litvinenko's death as a murder, Scotland Yard antiterrorism officers have been combing sites all over London, while colleagues traveled to Moscow. "This continues to be an extremely complex investigation, and detectives are pursuing many lines of inquiry," said a police spokeswoman. Litvinenko's excruciating and sinister death and the swirl of international politics around it make this a case worthy of John le Carré, but as the police insist, the classic questions of any murder...
...WOULD ANYONE WANT ALEXANDER Litvinenko dead? To answer that question, investigators are having to immerse themselves in the intrigues of postcommunist Russia and their echoes in London, the favored home away from home for Russian exiles, where Litvinenko sought asylum in 2001. (He became a British citizen two months...
...Litvinenko had spent the 1990s as an officer in the élite organized crime unit of the Federal Security Service (FSB), which was tasked with penetrating organized-crime gangs in the murky post-Soviet world of big money and official corruption. Like anyone else who touched that cesspit, he had collected some powerful enemies--and at least one ally. That was Boris Berezovsky, one of Russia's first billionaires, who made his money in cars and oil partly by using his excellent connections with Boris Yeltsin to buy state assets for much less than they turned out to be worth...