Word: murderable
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Whether or not anyone in the Kremlin had targeted Litvinenko, his death, coming just weeks after the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya in her Moscow apartment block, has sent a subzero chill over Russia's already frosty civil society. Human-rights campaigners and other Putin critics see the killing as the latest blow to democracy and free speech, part of a steady erosion of civil liberties. Russian democracy was chaotically vibrant just a decade ago, after the collapse of communism in 1991. But these days it is looking fragile. New legislation annuls independent candidates for the Duma (parliament...
...democracy and, in a 2001 book he co-wrote, went so far as to allege that Russian security services organized apartment-block bombings in 1999 that stoked support for a resurgence of the war in Chechnya. He had most recently made public statements tying the Kremlin to the murder of Politkovskaya. Litvinenko was reportedly meeting contacts in London in the hope of gaining information on the case when he was poisoned. "The bastards got me, but they won't get everybody," he told his friend Andrei Nekrasov shortly before his death...
...Litvinenko case revived memories of perhaps the most notorious assassination carried out during the cold war, the 1978 murder in London of Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident who was working for the BBC. He was killed with a ricin-tipped umbrella while waiting for a bus, in a case that has never been solved. Just like the Markov murder, the death of Litvinenko has already given rise to a flurry of conspiracy theories, including speculation among defenders of the government that the poisoning was arranged by Russian émigrés or Western intelligence agencies to discredit Moscow. But for many...
SAAD HARIRI, son of assassinated former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, on last week's murder of Cabinet Minister Pierre Gemayel, the latest in a string of killings since 2005 of pro-Western leaders who opposed influence from neighboring Syria...
DIED. Alexander Litvinenko, 43, former KGB spy and vocal critic of the Kremlin; of radiation poisoning; in London. He wrote a dramatic statement, released after his death, fingering Russian President Vladimir Putin as the engineer of his murder and describing him as "barbaric and ruthless." (See page...