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Question:
Do we really know whether or not he was
murdered?
Answer:
Alexander Litvinenko’s died
from exposure to radioactive Polonium-210 in London
on November 23, 2006. Even though there was too much
Polonium 210 in Litvinenko’s body for the radioactive
isotope to have occurred naturally, the British health
authorities were unable to determine how the man-made
substance "entered his body," and with typical
British understatement classified it merely as a "suspicious
death." At issue was how, by design or accident,
he came to be in such close proximity to a deadly radioactive
isotope.
There are two hypotheses that could account for this
fatal Polonium 210 contamination:
1) The murder hypothesis: Someone surreptitiously sprinkled
particles of Polonium 210 on his food.
2) The accident hypothesis: Polonium210 particles escaped
from a vial, envelope, or other container that he was
carrying.
The media initially fastened on the murder hypothesis
after it erroneously reported that Litvinenko had been
given the rat poison Thallium and then speculated that
the motive for the murder was to prevent him from disclosing
information about criminal deeds of the Russian government.
Even after it turned out (three weeks later) that the
cause of death was not Thallium, but Polonium 210, the
murder hypothesis continued to gain traction. Polonium
210, however, has very different attributes from Thallium
as a murder weapon. For one thing, unlike Thallium which
can kill over night, Polonium 210, takes weeks to kill.
(Litvinenko, in fact, lived-- and talked to the media--
for three weeks.) So it is not efficient if the purpose
is to silence a victim. Moreover, as the particles persists
for months, it leave tell-tale trail of radioactivity,
and it can even be traced back to the lab that produced
it.
Police investigators traced the Polonium 210 to at least
six locations that Litvinenko reportedly visited on
November 1st: 1) his own home, 2) the offices of billionaire
Russian exile Boris Berezovsky (his sometime employer)
3) the headquarters of business intelligence company
Erinys, 4)the Itsu sushi restaurant, where he had lunch
with Italian "defense consultant" Mario Scaramella
5) the Millennium hotel, where he with the two Russian
businessmen, and finally, 7) the Barnet General Hospital
where he was admitted that evening. Two other people
also got contaminated with Polonium 210-- Litvinenko's
wife and his lunch partner Scaramella. The common link
in this contamination patter is Litvinenko. According
to the murder theory, the assassin would have had to
sprinkle the Polonium onto Litvinenko's food at the
earliest contaminated location and Litvinenko himself
would have contaminated the subsequent locations with
low-level traces of Polonium 210 that oozed out of his
body. The problem here is that Scaramella got contaminated
at Itsu Sushi– the only place he met with Litvinenko
before he was hospitalized-- which, according to medical
experts, could have only came from his exposure to a
primary source (and not Litvinenko's secondary oozings),
yet the strength of the Polonium 210 at the Millennium
Hotel, which Litvinenko visited before going to the
Itsu Sushi, reportedly was too strong to have come from
Litvinenko's excretions (Daily UK Telegraph December
1,2006). If so, the primary Polonium 210 container--presumably
a vial or envelope-- was present at least two locations
that Litvinenko visited, and since Litvinenko was the
only person known to be at both locations, it would
suggest that Litvinenko himself had the container of
polonium 210 at both the Sushi bar to the hotel. In
addition, the date that the headquarters of Erinys may
have been well before the contamination of the Sushi
bar and the hotel. According to Andrei Lugovoi, the
ex-KGB associate whom he met with at the Millennium
Hotel, "Alexander Litvinenko, my business partner
Dmitry Kovtun and I were in London on October 17 at
a meeting in the office of (private security company)
Erinys." Since traces of Polonium 210 cannot be
dated, the contamination of those offices could have
occurred two weeks before Litvinenko was poisoned. If
so, either Litvinenko or his associates in this unknown
business had a container of Polonium 210.
The accident hypothesis , which also has problems, would
explain the radiation from a primary source at two locations,
or radiation traces that predated Litvinenko's poisoning.
It posits that Litvinenko had a vial of smuggled Polonium,
which through damage or an accident in transferring
it to another contained, leaked onto Litvinenko's clothing
or person.. Polonium 210 is a valuable commodity in
any gram-size quantity. Among its more nefarious uses,
it can be used to control a chain-reaction in an early-stage
clandestine nuclear weapons programs. Iraq, for example,
in 1990 had investigated using polonium 210, as an initiator
for a crude U-235 bomb. ( Polonium 210 traces were also
found by IAEA inspectors on Iranian nuclear components
in 2000. ). It may be relevant here that Mario Scaramella
told authorities that Litvinenko’s past interests
had included the "smuggling of nuclear material
out of Russia." That was for the KGB. If so, he
might have a host of reasons for possessing a smuggled
sample of Polonium 210, ranging from establishing the
bona fides of someone claiming to have access to a Russian
nuclear facility to investigating the traffic in components
for nukes. He or his associates might also be acting
as an intermediary in its sale.
Either hypothesis is possible. Why rush to judgment
before the results of the inquest?
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