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When Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, collapsed suddenly on Monday in the sleepy cathedral city of Salisbury, there were unavoidable echoes of a messy, high-profile death in London a little over a decade before. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, another former Russian agent, was rushed to hospital after collapsing in London. As the world watched, a rare and highly radioactive isotope destroyed his organs one by one, killing him three weeks later. A British public inquiry found that Litvinenko had ingested Polonium 210, and that his assassination was likely ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Mr Skripal, 66,...

A British judge thinks that Vladimir Putin 'probably' ordered the killing of FSB turned Mi6 agent Alexander Litvinenko. Carlsberg don't do inquiries but, if they did they'd 'probably' be better than this one. Back in the mid 1970's, Carlsberg's brewery in Northampton, England was searching for a slogan to market its beer. Due to laws against misrepresenting products, they were unable to state that it was "the best lager in the world." Thus, a compromise was found and a legendary advertising catchphrase was born. "Probably the best lager in the world."Carlsberg's phrase became so famous that it spawned further commercials...

Russia's president destroyed video of himself having sex with children, an ex-KGB spy claimed. Now a British inquiry has found that the Kremlin leader 'probably approved' assassinating him for it. LONDON - A prominent Russian dissident was assassinated in London with a deadly dose of radioactive poison because he had claimed that Vladimir Putin was a pedophile, according to an independent British inquiry. The hit was "probably" carried out on the personal orders of the Russian president. The allegation—that Putin had used his position as head of the Russian intelligence service to destroy video evidence of himself having sex with...

Vladimir Putin, Leader of the Free World By David P. Goldman on November 18, 2015 in AT Top Writers, David P. Goldman, Spengler If Mikhail Bulgakov had come back to life and written a Levantine sequel to The Master and Margarita, he could not have devised a scenario more lurid than what we now observe in Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin is now the leader of the Free World against Islamist terrorism, directing the efforts of France and Germany and setting terms for American involvement. Reeling from last week’s massacre in Paris, France lacks both the backbone and the brute...

Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB officer who is subject to a extradition request from the UK, strolled into his Moscow office flashing his broadest grin.As always, he was nattily dressed - this time in an open-necked Thomas Pink shirt. Extending a cuff-linked arm in greeting, he offered his guests a cup of tea and settled languorously into his leather swivel chair. For a man at the heart of the worst diplomatic crisis between Russia and Britain since the end of the Cold War, Mr Lugovoi seems to be insouciance personified. It was not always so. When The Daily Telegraph first...

An assassin sprayed a deadly poison into Alexander Litvinenko's tea, the man who served the victim and his killer has revealed.In the first eyewitness account of the moment the former Russian spy was consigned to death, Norberto Andrade describes how, as he tried to serve drinks to Mr Litvinenko and the former KGB agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, he was deliberately distracted in order, he claims, to allow the killer to add radioactive polonium to a pot of green tea. Mr Andrade, 67, the head barman of the Pine Bar at the Millennium Hotel in London, says investigators later...

BERLIN, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) -- A German radiation expert doubted Monday that Russia involved in the polonium-210 poisoning of former Russian spy Alexander Litvenenko. Sebastian Pflugbeil, president of the German Society for Radiation Protection, told ARD national television that he would not rule out the possibility that the poisoners had deliberately strewn traces of the isotope in London and Hamburg to mislead people. "If you keep polonium in a tightly shut vial, you can transport it without contamination and don't leave any dirty trail," he said, adding it was too obvious to be credible. "Either these killers were rank amateurs,...

Don't play dead for Putin Author: Max Boot, Senior Fellow for National Security Studies December 6, 2006 Los Angeles Times There are a lot of ways to make a man’s death look like an accident, suicide or a street crime. That wasn’t the intent of whoever murdered former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London. By using such an exotic murder weapon—a radioactive isotope known as polonium-210—his killers sent a message: Don’t mess with the powers that be in Russia. The identity of his murderers is likely to remain unknown, but in all probability Litvinenko was poisoned because of his campaign...

The death of Alexander Litvinenko by radiological poisoning points to the possibility that the former Soviet spy may have been involved with Islamic terrorists in the preparation of tactical nuclear weapons for use in the jihad against the United States and its NATO allies. (snip) In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to suitcase nukes that were developed by U.S. and Soviet forces during the Cold War. Reliable sources, including Hans Blix of the United Nation, have confirmed that bin Laden purchased several of these devices from the Chechen rebels in 1996. According to Sharif al-Masri and other al...

Detectives are investigating letters smuggled out of Russia purporting to show the existence of a secret squad set up to target poisoned spy Alexander Litvinenko and others, it was claimed today. Scotland Yard has been passed copies of two letters apparently penned in jail by former Russian intelligence officer Mikhail Trepashkin, in one of which Mr Litvinenko is warned that both he and his family are at risk. Mr Litvinenko's London friend Alex Goldfarb said scans of the letters came into his possession yesterday and he passed them to Scotland Yard. Mr Trepashkin, who worked for the KGB's successor the...

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