Russian assassinations are better than a James Bond movie

Posted on June 22, 2007
Filed Under General |

James bondYou might still remember the case of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko who was murdered using polonium-210, a radio-active toxin deadly in even tiny doses. Alexander was admitted to the critical-care unit at University College Hospital (UCH) London on November 17, 2006 and died from radiation poisoning two weeks later. Litvinenko was a vocal opponent of Russian president Vladimir Putin and an ex-officer of KGB’s successor the Federal Security Service (FSB.) Litvinenko was but the latest of a number of exotic Russian hits that are well documented.

Take for example, the 1978 assassination of Georgi Markov who was jabbed with an umbrella by an unidentified man while waiting for a bus near London’s Waterloo Bridge. Within days, Markov was dead not so much from the injury caused by the umbrella but from the poison ricin that was delivered via the umbrella’s tip on a small metal pellet lodged in his thigh.

Another unfortunate Russian was the entrepreneur Ivan Kivelidi who died unexpectedly in 1995. Investigators later found that he was killed by poison from a chemical weapon delivered to his body by being dusted over his phone receiver.

Other Russians have found themselves on the wrong side of the tracks paying for it with their lives including Yuri Shchekochikhin, Nikolai Khokhlov and Anna Politkovskaya. If you are wondering why these assassins go into so much trouble to kill their targets instead of using a simpler method such as shooting them, well, experts say that it has to do with trying to conceal the fact that these people were assassinated. Unfortunately for them, science today has advanced to the point that not only can be used to kill someone in an exotic way but also reveal the method used. I am willing to bet though, that there are many more people murdered every year in ways that we have yet to determine and I doubt that this game will ever stop. After all, assassinations have been part of politics since the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Comments

Leave a Reply




Your Ad Here