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The Polonium Diversion At least a dozen people have been contaminated by the rare radioactive isotope Polonium 210. The list includes Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB who died from a dose of Polonium 210 in London on November 23rd; Andrei Lugovoi, a former colleague of Litvinenko in the KGB, who met with Litvinenko at the Pine bar of the Millennium Hotel in London the day he became ill, November 1st; Dmitry Lugovoi, Lugovoi’s business associate, who also attended that November 1st meetings; 7 employees of the Millennium Hotel; Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant, who dined with...

Yegor Gaidar, Russia’s former prime minister and the architect of the country’s market reforms, last week suffered a sudden, unexplained and violent illness on a visit to Ireland, a day after Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB spy, died in London from an apparent radiation poisoning. Mr Gaidar is now in a stable condition at an undisclosed Moscow hospital, undergoing tests. In a telephone interview with the FT, Mr Gaidar said the doctors had so far been unable to identify the cause of the violent vomiting and bleeding that he suffered during a conference in Ireland. Anatoly Chubais, his former associate...

Police fear that the murder of a former Kremlin spy may have been part of a double killing plot after a second man was taken to hospital last night with radiation poisoning. The Anti-Terror Group is examining whether the killers of Alexander Litvinenko also tried to poison Mario Scaramella, an Italian security expert who met the Russian exile on the day that he fell ill. Toxicologists confirmed yesterday that Mr Scaramella had also been contaminated by a “significant” amount of deadly polonium-210. The level leads them to suspect that it was more than he could have ingested from simple physical...

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...

The British government sought on Tuesday to limit the information it would disclose at a planned inquest into the death of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former officer in the K.G.B. who succumbed to radiation poisoning in London more than six years ago. The coroner hearing the case said that it may now be postponed. “Due to the complexity of the investigation which necessarily precedes the hearings,” the coroner, Sir Robert Owen, said, “it may not be possible to adhere” to the planned May 1 start date for the hearings. The inquest would be the first — and probably the only...

FBI hazardous material experts searched a home where police found pipe bombs and a jar containing the potentially deadly poison ricin, federal agents said Friday. The ricin was found in a baby food jar in a shed of the home owned by a man who went to jail last week for violating protection orders taken out by his estranged wife, according to local and federal officials. The jar was sealed, and officials don't believe the middle-class neighborhood in east Nashville was threatened, although the one-story brick house and part of the street remained cordoned off. Investigators found three blasting caps...

The feds are saying flatly that the Vegas ricin case is not related to terrorism but I’m not so sure. The man who was staying at the Vegas hotel and is in the hospital in critical condition, who almost certainly manufactured the ricin from raw castor beans by following instructions in what authorities described as an “a book on anarchy,” is apparently obsessed with domestic animals: Neighbors in Utah described Mr. Von Bergendorff as a peculiar loner commonly seen in brown slacks and a brown shirt. Pauline and Grant Dansie, who live three doors down from Mr. Tholen, said Mr....

LAS VEGAS -- An unemployed graphic designer who told investigators that he found making ricin an "exotic idea" pleaded guilty Monday to possessing the deadly toxin in a hotel room here. Roger Bergendorff, 57, also pleaded guilty to a federal weapons charge. (A second weapons charge was dropped.) He could face up to 20 years in prison at his Nov. 3 sentencing, though prosecutors are recommending that he serve a little more than three years. Bergendorff reportedly fantasized about harming people with the poison -- he had sketched an "injection delivery device" disguised as a pen -- but never carried...

An alleged Islamic militant has told a Belgian court how he plotted to bomb a military base on an al-Qaeda mission. Nizar Trabelsi, a former Tunisian professional footballer, told how Osama Bin Laden's network sent him two years ago to Belgium to bomb the Kleine Brogel base, which houses nuclear missiles. He is one of 23 alleged Islamic militants on trial. Only eight of them are in custody, while five are still on the run and the others face lesser charges. "I was supposed to go alone in a van. The bomb was behind me," Mr Trabelsi told the Brussels...

"...The conspirators were in the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group’s MOS 09L program (“Lima Nine”), E Company, 187th Ordnance Battalion. Lima Nine was started because of the Army’s desperate lack of linguists speaking Pashto, Dari or Arabic. To attract such recruits, military intelligence promises foreigners that if they join the Army as a translator they will get U.S. citizenship and a top security clearance. Candidates from Afghanistan and Iraq, including the Jackson Five, speak such poor English the Army puts them in Lima Nine and gives them English lessons, so they will have some hope of passing basic training. Clayton...

A South Carolina congressman said Friday that five Muslim soldiers at Fort Jackson, S.C., had been removed from active duty, and four of them discharged from the Army, in connection with an ongoing probe into alleged threats to poison food at the large South Carolina base. Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said the soldiers' laptops had been seized and were being analyzed. Congressional officials with knowledge of the case said cell phones and Arabic writings had been confiscated as well. Wilson also disclosed for the first time that four of the Muslim soldiers...

If there was nothing to the allegations, then why were four of the five Muslim soldiers discharged? It seems to me that the earliest reports were wrong that the five Muslims were plotting to poison Fort Jackson's food supply. But later reports that there were nothing to the allegations were also clarified when we learned that the investigation was not into a plot but over comments about poisoning the food.

Breaking News: Pakistan Reportedly Detains Five D.C.-Area Muslims on Suspicion of Terror IPT News December 8, 2009 **Updated December 9, 9:00 a.m. EST A Pakistani newspaper reports the arrest of five foreign nationals after a raid in a town called Sargodha. The raid took place at the home of a member of the Jaish-e-Muhammad, a Pakistani movement designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2001. According to the report, "The DPO told that these people had been living in Sargodha since Nov 30 and it was quite a possibility that they were engaged in acts of...

<p>No info at link yet, just came across the TV. Investigators believe that the poisoners where Arabic translators! ROP strikes again???</p>

It has the makings of international intrigue. Less than two weeks before the Democratic National Convention a man has been found dead in a Denver hotel room with a container of what authorities initially suspect to be the deadly poison cyanide. Adding to the intrigue is that the dead man, Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, appears to be from outside the U.S. No passport was found on Dirie, who is believed to have entered the country from Canada. A large container of a white powdery substance was found in the man's room on the fourth floor of the Burnsley Hotel at...

DENVER (CBS4) ― It has the makings of international intrigue. Less than two weeks before the Democratic National Convention a man has been found dead in a Denver hotel room with a container of what authorities initially suspect to be the deadly poison cyanide. Adding to the intrigue is that the dead man, Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, 29, appears to be from outside the U.S. No passport was found on Dirie, who is believed to have entered the country from Canada. A large container of a white powdery substance was found in the man's room on the fourth floor of The...

WASHINGTON, Aug 3: Five years after her mysterious disappearance in Karachi, the FBI has finally conceded that an MIT-trained Pakistani neuroscientist is alive and is in US custody in Afghanistan. Aafia Siddiqui, 36, disappeared with her three children while visiting her parents’ home in Karachi in March 2003, around the same time the FBI announced that it wanted to question her over her alleged links to Al Qaeda. Her family’s lawyer Elaine Whitfield Sharp said she believed recent media reports about Mrs Siddiqui’s incarceration increased pressure on the US and Pakistani authorities to divulge more information. “I don’t believe that...

Sep. 25, 2004 17:49 | Updated Sep. 26, 2004 20:49 Mashaal: Hamas is in state of alert By ASSOCIATED PRESS CAIRO, Egypt Khaled Mashaal, the head of Hamas's political bureau, whose group sends suicide bombers into Israel, knows that Israel has him targeted again. And the leader of the Damascus-based political bureau of Hamas is taking no chances. "We are in a state of alert and vigilance," he told The Associated Press this week during a visit to Cairo from his home base in the Syrian capital, Damascus. Since the double Hamas suicide bombing on August 31 in the southern...

A sky-high Swedish farewell cake poisons 13 Fri Oct 29, 3:14 PM ET STOCKHOLM (AFP) - Thirteen employees of a botanical garden in Stockholm ended up in the hospital showing symptoms of drug poisoning after a departing intern served them cake as a goodbye gesture, police said. A 27-year-old intern at the Bergianska traedgaard in Stockholm had baked a cake for his colleagues on his last day of work. After eating the cake with their morning coffee, "five people became ill. They showed signs of having been drugged. Later on, more people got sick," Stockholm police spokesman Bjoern Pihlblad told...