![]() Russian activist Vladimir Kara-Murza arrives for a U.S. ”It’s not seen that way in the West, but it was just viewed as an ordinary tool.” ”The view inside our agency was that poison is just a weapon, like a pistol,” Litvinenko told the New York Times two years before his assassination. “It sends a particularly strong message.”įor all that, Litvinenko probably was none too surprised. “I t’s a terrible way to die,” Hall says. The use of polonium to kill Litvinenko served another purpose. He authored a book accusing the Russian FSB - the successor to the KGB - of complicity in the 1999 apartment bombings that Putin blamed on Chechen separatists, served as the pretext for renewed military operations there, and acted as Putin’s springboard to power. Litvinenko fled Russia in 2000 and established himself as a prominent critic of President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s security services. The dissident Russian spy was killed in 2006 when he ingested polonium-210, a highly radioactive substance, that had been slipped into his tea. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)įar and away the most famous example of an assassination by poison is Alexander Litvinenko. The tactic sends a clear message to those thinking of defection or dissent, says Steve Hall, who up until his retirement in 2015 ran Russia operations for the CIA: “We’ll find you.”Ī picture of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko is pinned to flowers outside the University College Hospital in central London on Nov. Yet the list of Russian men and women targeted for assassination after falling afoul of the Kremlin includes quite a few felled by poison. ![]() And in 1997, Israeli agents attempted to assassinate a Hamas leader, Khaled Mashal, with a lethal dose of fentanyl. Last year, North Korean agents assassinated leader Kim Jong Un’s half brother using the nerve agent VX. The use of a highly toxic nerve agent, however, is typically only employed by state security services, and Russia is not alone in deploying nerve agents against its enemies. The Kremlin immediately denied any involvement, and no conclusive evidence has emerged tying Russian security services to the attempted assassination. With the announcement by British police that a nerve agent was involved, suspicion immediately fell upon Russian spy services, which have a history of assassinating renegade spies and dissidents, sometimes with poison. “This is being treated as a major incident involving attempted murder by administration of a nerve agent,” Mark Rowley, Britain’s chief police official for counterterrorism and international security, said.Ī Russian court convicted Skripal of spying on behalf of Britain in 2006, but he was returned to England as part of a spy swap in 2010. A police officer who aided the two is in stable condition, and is conscious and talking. On Thursday, British police said that around 21 people had sought treatment as a result of exposure to the unidentified poison. Skripal was walking with his daughter on Monday when they fell ill, collapsed on a park bench, and were promptly rushed to the hospital, where they remain in critical condition. With the announcement by British police on Wednesday that a former Russian spy was poisoned by a nerve agent, Sergei Skripal joins the long ranks of those who have run afoul of the Kremlin and subsequently fallen ill or died under what can only be described as suspicious circumstances.
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