The Reporting Of The Attempted Assassination Of Alexander Litvinenko

Yesterday, the BBC reported that,

"UK police are investigating the poisoning of a Russian former security agent and critic of President Vladimir Putin living in exile in Britain...

Mr Litvinenko fled Russia and was granted political asylum in Britain in 2001...

He said he had been investigating the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed in Moscow last month.

Speaking to the BBC last week, before his condition deteriorated, Mr Litvinenko said the contact had approached him to say they should talk and they arranged to meet at the restaurant in Piccadilly.
"He gave me some papers which contained some names on it - perhaps names of those who may have been involved in the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, and several hours after the meeting I started to feel sick."...

Mr Litvinenko had earlier alleged that members of the Federal Security Service (FSB) - the main successor to the Soviet KGB - had plotted to kill the powerful Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky.
He also wrote a book called Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, alleging that FSB agents coordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people.
Russian officials blamed the explosions on Chechen separatists and in that year the Kremlin launched a new military offensive on Chechnya.

Ms Politkovskaya, a harsh critic of Mr Putin and Russian policy in Chechnya, was shot dead at her Moscow apartment building.
She was one of the few Russian journalists to write about alleged human rights abuses in Chechnya and had received death threats in the past.
Ms Politkovskaya became ill with food-poisoning on her way to report on the Beslan school siege in 2004, which some believed may have been an attempt on her life. "

Sky News has likened the affair to the 1978 assassination of Georgi Markov.

The Sunday Telegraph reported the poisoning under the headline 'Leading Russian critic of Putin's regime is poisoned in London', writing that,

"Alexander Litvinenko, a former colonel in the Russian secret service and a fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin, was seriously ill under armed guard at a London hospital last night.
Mr Litvinenko, 50, who used to work for the Federal Security Bureau (FSB, the former KGB), fell ill after meeting a contact at Itsu, a sushi restaurant in Piccadilly. The woman journalist claimed to have information on the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, 48, the outspoken journalist who was killed at her Moscow apartment last month.
A close friend of Mr Litvinenko said last night: "Alexander has no doubt that he was poisoned at the instigation of the Russian government." He has been living at a secret address in London with his wife and son because he feared he might be targeted by political opponents...

He went to meet the woman journalist at Itsu on November 1 after she claimed to have information about the shooting of Miss Politkovskaya, also a fierce critic of President Putin. The next day, Mr Litvinenko complained of feeling unwell and was admitted to hospital. It was thought he had nothing more than a serious stomach upset but in recent days his condition has deteriorated. Friends say the journalist may have been a genuine contact but that political opponents may have discovered the venue for their meeting and slipped the poison into his meal or drink."

The Sunday Telegraph also carried an interview with Boris Berezovsky, under the headline 'Putin tried to kill my friend'.

Berezovsky is reported to have said of Putin that,

"I know people in Britain find it difficult to believe that someone who is a leader of a G8 country and someone who struts across the world stage as a democrat could order something like this to be done...But people need to understand he is a bandit."

The report containing the interview continued,

"The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that he was examined in hospital by Professor John Henry, a British toxicologist who two years ago was one of the first to confirm that Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian president, had been poisoned during the election campaign. After being poisoned, Mr Yushchenko's face blistered violently...

Russians who speak out against Mr Putin's administration – especially journalists – fear for their lives. When Ms Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lift of her apartment block in Moscow last month, she was the 13th journalist to be murdered. She ran a relentless campaign exposing corruption in the army and its brutal reign in Chechnya.
Since her assassination, the Committee to Protect Journalists has disclosed that Russia has become the third most dangerous place in the world to work: only in Iraq and Algeria have more reporters been murdered. What is perhaps more chilling is that not one of the 13 murders of journalists has been solved.
When Mr Putin came to power he declared: "Our press is free and forever will be." The honeymoon did not last. Instead of following a path to democracy, Mr Putin, a former head of the KGB, has reasserted the centralised Kremlin control of the Soviet era."

This morning's 'Daily Telegraph' was little better.

Under the headline 'Ex-KGB colonel 'poisoned by Russian agents', its crime correspondent, John 'Dum-Dum' Steele, wrote,

"In an episode reminiscent of the intrigue and plots at height of the Cold War, Alexander Litvinenko, 43, a former KGB colonel in exile in London since 2000, fell ill at the start of the month after meeting a contact in a London restaurant. He is said to have been investigating the recent murder of a woman journalist in Moscow....

Alex Goldfarb, who brought him to Britain six years ago and has been visiting him in hospital, said he had been warned that his friend’s chances of survival were only 50/50.
Mr Goldfarb added that he believed Mr Litvinenko, a critic of President Putin, had been targeted by the Russian regime.
“Of course we do not have any direct evidence other than he met some people during that day,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “He actually had a couple of meetings where he had drinks and this poison could be sprinkled there"...

Reports so far have not suggested anything as dramatic as the murder in 1978 of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, who died after being shot in London with a ricin-tipped pellet from an umbrella gun.
However, the incident comes only weeks after the murder of the Russian journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Russia's role in Chechnya."

The newspaper also carries a profile of Litvinenko, in which he is reported to have said that,

"Above all, I am a patriot. I believe Russia will rise again and that I will manage to return again to the motherland and Moscow."

He has previously been reported as having acquired British citizenship in October 2006.

Today's 'Times' and 'Daily Mail' have also joined the hanging party currently being arranged for President Vladimir Putin.

These are the facts that we know so far.

Litvinenko has been poisoned.

He was formerly an officer in the Soviet, then Russian, state security apparatuses; an apparatchik.

He was granted asylum.

He is an associate of Boris Berezovsky, a very sinister, very well-connected person to whom it was a mistake to grant asylum and who has abused that privilege by saying that "President Putin violates the constitution... and any violent action on the opposition's part is justified today...That includes taking power by force, which is exactly what I am working on".

Having thus declared his intention to overthrow the government of a friendly foreign power, his continued residence in the United Kingdom is no longer in alignment with the common good.

At the time he is believed to have been poisoned, Litvinenko was investigating the murder of Anna Politkovskaya.

Not one shred of evidence linking the Russian state to Anna Politkovskaya's murder has been placed the public domain.

Don't just take my word for it; take Mark Ames'.

And the circumstances of Litvinenko's poisoning might indicate that he had plenty of enemies other than Putin!

Life Style Extra reports that,

"The Russian mafia were more "likely" to have poisoned a former KGB spy because of his role in

investigating organised crime than the Russian intelligence services, an expert claimed today...

"While another expert said Alexander Litvinenko was not important enough to have been targetted by his former bosses...

"...an intelligence expert said the former lieutenant-colonel defected six years ago and if the FSB ran assassination squads, he would have been targetted then rather than five to six years down the line. Security risk analyst Will Geddes said any former spy, especially ones that left under a black cloud, remain "paranoid." Instead Mr Litvinenko could have been targetted by mafia hitmen because of his job of investigating organised criminal gangs who bloomed after the demise of the Soviet Union and the selling off of state firms.

Mr Geddes said: "Five years down the line, whether he was holding any damaging information to Putin would be highly unlikely. If the FSB had an assassination squad, the time of his defection would have been the time to take him out."It is not impossible that he has been poisoned, whether by the KGB/FSB it is difficult to say."Speculatively, if he was working with journalists and they were investigating the FSB, he would be preying into a world that he knows all too well. "He could be prodding an old wound, but it seem more likely to be organised crime rather than the FSB."Organised criminals are more likely to take these kinds of risks. The two for a long time were alleged to be interlaced pretty fully....

A journalist at Russian London Limited added: "There are plenty of people that would be bigger targets than this guy, ex-Chechen guerrillas and people that Russia is trying to extradite back to face charges...

""There are a lot of Russian people living overseas who believe they are in danger."If something happens to these people for any reason, whether they be struck by lightening, or maybe they are hit by a boy racer in London, or if they simply are faced with a natural disease they immediately blame it on the Russian secret services."It's a bit of a paranoia. They are constantly thinking that someone is after them. Russia is not like that anymore, although some people would like to believe it is."Many people are trying to think it's still scary stories about the Russian Secret Service but I don't think so. "They are too busy making money, they don't have any time to try and kill people off."

Mr Litvinenko defected to the UK in 2000 after he claimed he was left out in the cold and punished for speaking out by being arrested twice on trumped up charges - only to be acquitted in court.He was then forced to flee to Turkey when he was faced further arrest on falsifying evidence charges.He has accused the Russian authorities of trying to kill Tycoon Boris Berezovsky who was close to the then president Boris Yeltsin in 1998 and being behind the bombing of a Moscow apartment block in which 228 people were killed in 1999. "

Telegraph Newspapers' rabid Putinophobia is beyond dispute - but what has happened here is an across the board collapse in journalistic standards and descent into innuendo one very low rung above yellow journalism.

Today, the British press should be hanging their heads in shame.