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Aircraft tested in spy death caseTwo BA planes at Heathrow Airport are being tested in the wake of the death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, the Home Office said. Plans were also being made to examine a third plane in Moscow, they added. Traces of radioactive polonium-210 were discovered in Mr Litvinenko's body, when he died in London last week. Initial results of the forensic tests showed very low traces of a radioactive substance onboard two of the three aircraft, said British Airways.

The radioactive material that killed a former Russian spy in Britain can be bought on the Internet for $69. Polonium-210, which experts say is many times more deadly than cyanide, can be bought legally through United Nuclear Scientific Supplies, a mail-order company that sells through the Web, based in Sandia Park, N.M. Chemcial companies sell the Polonium-210 legally for industrial use, such as removing static electricity from machinery. United Nuclear claims that it's "currently the only legal Alpha source available without a license." The type of Polonium-210 sold emits alpha radiation, which can't penetrate the skin, but is deadly if...

The Kremlin mounted a concerted campaign yesterday to point the finger of suspicion at the billionaire businessman Boris Berezovsky over the death of his friend, Alexander Litvinenko, after traces of radioactive polonium-210 were found at the London offices of the exiled Russian oligarch.Senior figures in the Russian establishment lined up to implicate Mr Berezovsky, who employed and funded the former KGB spy. The billionaire, who has been granted asylum in Britain, last night issued a statement mourning Mr Litvinenko’s death and saying that he had “complete faith” that Scotland Yard would conduct a “thorough and professional investigation”. Detectives are understood...

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...

I would like to thank many people. My doctors, nurses and hospital staff who are doing all they can for me; the British police who are pursuing my case with vigor and professionalism and are watching over me and my family. I would like to thank the British government for taking me under their care. I am honored to be a British citizen. I would like to thank the British public for their messages of support and for the interest they have shown in my plight. I thank my wife, Marina, who has stood by me. My love for her...

Police and security services believe the assassin secretly sprayed a mist of radioactive polonium-210 on Mr Litvinenko’s meal at a sushi bar. A large quantity of the element was found in his urine hours before he died at UCH. Traces were also found at the Itsu sushi bar in Piccadilly where he met an Italian contact on November 1 — AND at the London Millennium Hotel where he later met two Russians. The substance has also been identified in the Litvinenko family’s modern town house in Muswell Hill, North London. Anti-terrorist officers from Scotland Yard’s SO15 department believe the sushi...

Spy death: Russian Lawmakers blame tycoon NDTV Correspondent Saturday, November 25, 2006 (Moscow): Pro-Kremlin lawmakers and state-controlled television networks point the finger for the death of former spy Alexander Litvinenko at a prominent Putin enemy in UK - tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Though Litvinenko's deathbed message has accused Russian President Vladimir Putin. Legislators seconded a top Putin aide's suggestion that Litvinenko's death in a London hospital on Thursday was part of a plot against Russia. They claimed that Berezovsky, a major critic whose asylum in Britain has enraged the Kremlin, was involved in the killing. "The death of Litvinenko for Russia,...

Now that the source of the radiation that killed Alexander Litvinenko has been identified, the metal’s rarity could help to lead police to his killers. Polonium-210, the isotope identified in Mr Litvinenko’s body, is known to be highly toxic and radioactive, and it is not easy to come by. It occurs naturally only at trace levels, and larger amounts that would be needed to kill are manufactured in nuclear reactors or particle accelerators by bombarding bismuth-209, a similar but inert metal, with neutrons. Unlike certain other radioactive isotopes, such as caesium-137 and cobalt-60, it is not used in medical radiology,...

Murdered Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko passed documents to former Yukos CEO in Israel months before his death - report November 25, 2006, 9:10 AM (GMT+02:00) Leonid Nevzlin, former CEO of the oil giant and current chairman of the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, says the former Russian spy came to Israel with classified documents on Yukos which may be damaging to Russian leaders. Nevzliln estimates that Litvinenko’s death was connected with this information, which he has handed to London police investigators of the murder. DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources add that the Russian ex-spy is believed to have been a double agent,...

Russia is responding to allegations Putin engineered the poisoning of former FSB Colonel Litvienko. I'm not a fan of Putin - or his regime - but the denials make more sense than the media's rush to judgment !

An investigation was under way last night into Russia's black market trade in radioactive materials amid concern that significant quantities of polonium 210, the substance that killed former spy Alexander Litvinenko, are being stolen from poorly protected Russian nuclear sites. As British police drew up a list of witnesses for questioning over the death, experts warned that thefts from nuclear facilities in the former Soviet Union were a major problem. A senior source at the United Nations nuclear inspectorate, the International Atomic Energy Agency, told The Observer he had no doubt that the killing of Litvinenko was an 'organised operation'...

This is a very tangled story,the truth of which we will probably never learn - but: Not to worry ! The media has made up its mind : When in doubt, blame Putin !

More radiation found in spy case Mr Litvinenko was a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin Traces of polonium-210 radiation have been found at two more central London addresses, police probing ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko's death say. One address, in Down Street, reportedly houses the offices of his friend, exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky. The other location, in Grosvenor Street, is the headquarters of security and risk management company Erinys. Traces of the substance have already been found at a sushi restaurant, hotel and Mr Litvinenko's north London home. Three people who have either been to the venues or had...

LONDON, November 28 (RIA Novosti) - British police said Tuesday they had found traces of a radioactive isotope believed to have killed a Russian ex-spy, in an office building of his associate, fugitive Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian intelligence defector, died Thursday in a London hospital with symptoms of radioactive poisoning. British health officials said Friday a large dose of Po-210, a toxic uranium by-product, had been found in his body. Berezovsky, a billionaire with British citizenship wanted in Russia for fraud, whose office is located at 7 Down Street, Mayfair, declined to comment on the radiation...

An Italian contact of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, killed by radioactive poisoning in London, claimed that the Kremlin ordered his death because he knew too much, an Italian newspaper reported Saturday. "Litvinenko didn't die from stomach pain," Mario Scaramella, one of the last to see him alive, said in an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera. A professor at the University of Naples, Scaramella had been a consultant for an Italian parliamentary inquiry into agents recruited in Italy by the former Soviet KGB secret service. Litvinenko collaborated with the Italian inquiry commission. When asked by the newspaper if he...

"Global Trends 2015" Terrorism-Related Excerpts -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following items are terrorism-related items from the National Intelligence Council's "Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts" report (December 2000). Transnational Terrorism (page 50) States with poor governance; ethnic, cultural, or religious tensions; weak economies; and porous borders will be prime breeding grounds for terrorism. In such states, domestic groups will challenge the entrenched government, and transnational networks seeking safehavens. At the same time, the trend away from state-supported political terrorism and toward more diverse, free-wheeling, transnational networks—enabled by information technology—will continue. Some of the states that actively sponsor...

On New Year’s Day in 1988, Abdullah Ali, an Iraqi businessman who had been living in London for eight years, joined three compatriots for dinner at a restaurant called Cleopatra in Notting Hill.The next morning, he was taken ill with flu-like symptoms and was admitted to hospital. There his condition rapidly deteriorated — his hair fell out, he developed excruciating skin and joint pain, and paralysis and respiratory failure began to set in. Fifteen days later he was dead — but not before he had begun to wonder whether something had been added to his vodka. He was right: the...

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of the Kremlin because of his biting mockery of President Putin, according to a former Soviet spy now living in Britain. Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent to defect to Britain, said that the attempt to kill Mr Litvinenko had been state-sponsored. It was carried out by a Russian friend and former colleague who had been recruited secretly in prison by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The Italian who allegedly put poison in Mr Litvinenko’s sushi “had nothing to do with it”. “Of course it is state-sponsored. He...

IMAGINE you were a foreign power that wanted to get rid of a dissident who had set up home in London. Would you (a) push the troublemaker under a bus, (b) have him mown down by a hit-run driver, or (c) arrange for him to be poisoned while eating in a crowded restaurant? If you wanted to make the death look natural, or just to keep things simple, you would presumably avoid the restaurant scenario. And yet, if many Russia-watchers are to be believed, the country's Federal Security Service (FSB) has carried out just such an assassination. On November 1,...

Is Putin Being Set Up? by Patrick J. Buchanan Posted Nov 27, 2006 PARIS—Whoever poisoned Alexander Litvinenko had two goals: a long and lingering death for the KGB defector and pointing a finger of accusation for his killing right in the face of Vladimir Putin. Which leads me to believe Putin had nothing to do with it. In an assassination, one must ask: Cui bono? To whose benefit? Who would gain from the poisoning of Litvinenko? Certainly not Putin. Litvinenko's death puts him, the Kremlin and the KGB, now the FSB, under suspicion of having reverted to the terror tactics...