Word: murderous
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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...
Exactly how or why the dose was administered, and by whom, remains a mystery. The 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 as in that Markov case, the death of Litvinenko has already given rise to a flurry of conspiracy theories, including speculation among defenders of Putin's government that the poisoning...
...kind of person for whose sake we would spoil bilateral relations [with Britain]," and a Kremlin spokesman said talk about any possible role it may have had in the affair was "sheer nonsense." Sergei Yastrzhembsky, Putin's chief envoy to the European Union, suggested that the murder might be part of "a well-orchestrated campaign or plan to consistently discredit Russia and its leader." Asked about the matter at a Russia-E.U. meeting in Helsinki on Friday, Putin described it as a tragedy and offered his condolences to Litvinenko's family, but he questioned whether the deathbed note...
...latest move in a carefully calculated strategy to get rid of an organization that has been outspoken on behalf of victims of human-rights violations in Chechnya." Dmitrievsky himself says that Russia is veering away from democracy and back toward authoritarianism. "It's obvious after the Politkovskaya murder that no one is immune. We're all walking under a falling ax now," he told Time...
...lawyer, 45, has made it her life's work to document allegations of executions, disappearances, rapes and torture in Chechnya. "Mass-scale human-rights violations and state-level terror still are the order of the day," she says. Several times she worked with the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, whose "murder sent a signal to mop up 'undesirable elements' and tell the public, 'We don't give a damn what you think.'" Violence, Yusupova believes, has its own logic. "Everyone now is endangered, not only those who live in Chechnya, but those who live in Russia as well." Yet she's sure...