“Weaponized” Polonium-210 and What It May Mean
By: TRex



There's a couple of things that are really strange to me about the poisoning death of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko. And now it looks like even more people may have been exposed (AP via Salon), which in turn raises a whole new set of questions:



This is sending up red flags for a number of reasons. The first thing that's odd is the actual nature of the poison. Let me see if I can break this down quickly.

Polonium-210 is a highly radioactive isotope that has certain very specific uses, for instance in anti-static brushes for photographic film. It's incredibly complicated to make and under normal circumstances, it's not harmful to humans because it emits alpha radiation, which is explained thusly by US Army Environmental Glossary:



Unless you eat, drink, or inhale polonium, or take it in through a break in the skin, it's basically harmless. So, that would lead us to believe that it was in Litvinenko's food at the London sushi bar where he was poisoned. My question is how sick is the Italian who met with him? Has he, too, received a lethal dose or was he exposed by proximity, getting a lower dose? According to this story on NPR's All Things Considered, the amount of polonium-210 that would make up a lethal dose would be approximately the size of a grain of sand, so if Scaramella received a non-lethal dose, the amount would have to be minuscule.

But here's the thing. Once polonium is ingested through the mouth, it meets another impediment to lethal poisoning, the gut-transfer barrier.

Salon interviewed nuclear expert John Large, who explains it thusly:



This has massive implications. Radiological medicine operates on this principle, given that radioactive isotopes, once introduced to the system, naturally settle in various organs, depending upon the nature of the isotope. We use this for radiological imaging and chemotherapy, where radiation is used to disrupt the reproduction of rogue cells like tumors. But in these methods, because of the gut-transfer barrier, the isotopes must be introduced intravenously.

That doesn't seem to be the case with Litvinenko. There is the chance that he inhaled polonium-210 rather than eating it, but due to the slow uptake polonium in the lungs, it would take some months for a lethal dose (5 units of radiation) to (in Large's words) "do its evil work". He could have been injected with the poison, but how would that account for Scaramella's exposure? These questions raise the possibility of nanotechnology, which is basically a fancy word for chemistry that works with matter on a scale smaller than 100 nanometers (1/10-9 meters).

From Wikipedia:



We're talking about the "bottom-up" version of nanotechnology here, where whoever engineered this poison has potentially made it so that its chemical signature allows it to elude the body's normal defenses and concentrate in the victim's organs, disrupting the cells and setting in motion a systemic collapse. In Litvinenko's case, the poison settled into the surface and marrow of his bones, where blood cells are minted and put into circulation. The polonium killed his blood, which in turn killed him.

A poison this complicated is rather beyond the means of most chemists, requiring an elaborate set of tools and laboratories.

John Large:



Large feels that this therefore directly implicates the Russian government. By his reasoning, a state apparatus is an absolute necessity to this equation.

But that's the second thing that strikes me as odd about this whole deal. If the Russian government wanted to take down an enemy, don't you think they would do it in some less public and spectacular way? Is this a message to other enemies of the Putin regime?

And here's where I am going to venture into the realm of rank speculation. My personal theory is that this and other recent murders of Putin's ideological opponents (that link is to a story about journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building) may not in fact be the work of the Kremlin, but rather the work of some agency with a direct interest in bringing down the Putin government.

In the years since the introduction of the free-market system in Russia, the Russian mafia has amassed a huge amount of wealth and power, as well as private citizens like jailed petroleum oligarch Mikhail Kordorkovsky. Moscow now has the highest concentration of millionaires of any city in the world. When capitalism came to the former USSR, some savvy operators seized that opportunity to suck up and horde most of the money in the country.

There are very powerful interests at work here, and it would not surprise me to find that this plot has layers on layers of intrigue. You may need a state apparatus to make polonium-210, particularly what appears to be a "weaponized" form, but all you need to buy it is money. At every stage of the process, there are people who could potentially be bought out or threatened. And one thing the power players in the former Soviet Union have in abundance is money.

So, I would not be so eager to lay the blame for this and other seemingly politically motivated murders at the feet of the Putin administration. Not because I believe that they are particularly good or just, but because I think it would be hasty to assume that they are the only malevolent actors in this particular drama.
FireDogLake

More on Polonium-210
By: TRex



A reader has written in to clear up some of the mystery around polonium-210 for us.



First, I have to say that this kind of information just makes my toes curl with geeky delight. It really is sort of out of my area, being an infectious disease nerd, so to me atomic science is all exotic and shit.

(Uh. Mah. Gawd. I just used the phrase "infectious disease nerd".)

This point might explain the presence of radiation in the planes:



Once contaminated, a person apparently excretes radiation in their body wastes, so the traces of radioactivity in the BA planes could well have been found in the lavatories and sanitary equipment.

Reader MarkusQ indicates that I may be totally flying blind in terms of nanotech:



You think? John Long seemed to think it was an option in the Salon article. It's a little spooky in what it means in terms of weapons technology, but it could have really interesting implications for the future of nuclear medicine, that is, if the technology ever becomes public and is used for less nefarious purposes.

But anyway, this is my theory as it stands: I believe the polonium was inhaled through a loaded pack of cigarettes, which would get it past the gut-transfer barrier, although it doesn't account for the extreme, rapid lethality. People have died of polonium-210 inhalation before, but from what I understand, it's a gradual, slow-moving death. Medical specialists, feel free to sound off in the comments, but it usually manifests in the form of leukemia, doesn't it? And all of this hinges on Litvinenko being a smoker. If he wasn't, then we're back to oral ingestion. It would make sense, though, that the guy he met for lunch could have been exposed through second-hand smoke, as well as Litvinenko's wife.

And yes, all you righteous non-smokers may now chime in about the dangers of second-hand smoke.

Grumble.

UPDATE: In the comments we were just discussing that if someone other than the Russian government is doing this, they're not just sending a signal to the Kremlin that says, "We are framing you for these murders," they're also saying, "We have access to your nuclear chemicals."

Or someone's nuclear chemicals. Otherwise, why not use ricin again or just a gun?

A most interesting thread, Noonan.

Several points: This murder was obviously meant to get people's attention.

And it has.

Anna Politovskaya took 3 9mm slugs to the head. How crude, but she's just as dead as Litvinenko.

Cig smoke is probably the entry point. He got sick right away, but took nearly a month to die, plus he got excellent medical care (it's free in UK). He was also in good physical shape, even tho he smoked.

So it could be mafia. It could also be Putin or his KGB ilk (he is 3rd generation KGB, let us not forget).

And Putin is at war with the Oligarchs like Chodorchofsky whose Yukos he re-patriated. Putin is building a state owned oil and gas monopoly, which is probably a good idea. After all, he has 60 years of mis-management to repair, a dwindling population base, rusted factories that used to make worthless junk anyway.

I can't refute your theories. I think more info will shake out as MI6 tracks the people who are turning up radioactive.

BTW, altho Litvinenko got the fatal dose, my guess is that the absorbtion by all the rest was far lower than that.

Nothng surprising to me.

Because this is just like the timing of a number of events.

That did not smell right to Mr. Nose (mine).

Like-when supposedly the terrorists (boooo) burned and hanged some soldiers.
Or when Nick Berg was beheaded, and some of the others.

At exactly the WRONG TIME

Those things always happened when Bush was down low in the ratings.

I am 100 percent convinced GEORGE W. BUSH and his family did all those events to rally his ratings a bit, and continue the war. All of them happened just when his ratings were down, and the public was ready to end things.

It is funny- I am waiting for Bush to say Al Queda is doing this germ warfare.
Funny he didn't.

And I don't believe in most Conspicy things, because like 9-11, it is all fixed and what they tell us, beyond a shadow of a doubt, my nose knows was wrong.

I always had a big nose, at least its good for sniffin' out these things.

Where are Bush41's fingeprints in all this???
This would be another event, btw, that would make a great movie.
Die Hard5.

Thanks, but...


They're not "my theories" - I'm sliding back into my role of collecting articles from around the blogosphere and posting them here for discussion. TRex from FireDogLake wrote the original article, with the follow up as posted.

it's too bad the russian spy wasn't gay, and had a couple of high up
American gay friends.

Wouldn't it be interesting if upper people in the admistration caught it too.
How ironic woul that be?

December 3, 2006
All Aglow
Polonium, $22.50 Plus Tax
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

THE trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V. Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated.

The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr. Litvinenko’s body and now in high levels in the body of an Italian associate, who has been hospitalized in London. Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity.

“You can get it all over the place,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. “And it’s a terrible way to go.”

Today, polonium 210 can show up in everything from atom bombs, to antistatic brushes to cigarette smoke, though in the last case only minute quantities are involved. Iran made relatively large amounts of polonium 210 in what some experts call a secret effort to develop nuclear arms, and North Korea probably used it to trigger its recent nuclear blast.

Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax. “Radiation from polonium is dangerous if the solid material is ingested or inhaled,” warns the label of an antistatic brush. “Keep away from children.”

Peter D. Zimmerman, a professor in the war studies department of King’s College, London, said the many industrial uses of polonium 210 threatened to complicate efforts at solving the Litvinenko case. “It’s a great Agatha Christie novel,” he said. “She couldn’t have written anything weirder than this.”

Mr. Litvinenko, 43, a vocal critic of the Russian government, died on Nov. 23 after a traumatic illness in which his organs failed and his hair fell out. As he lay dying, he claimed that he had been poisoned and blamed Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. The Kremlin dismissed the charge as absurd.

The British authorities soon found that Mr. Litvinenko had died of polonium 210 poisoning in what appeared to be its first use as a murder weapon. Conspiracy theorists said Russia had the motive and means, noting its long history of polonium work, as well as creative assassinations. The recent discovery of traces of radioactivity on British commercial jets flying to and from Russia has heightened the suspicions.

As in any good murder mystery, the deadliness was foreshadowed. Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive element in 1898 and named it after her native Poland, organized its close study. One of her polonium workers died in 1927 from apparent poisoning, according to Susan Quinn, author of “Marie Curie: A Life” (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Another worker lost her hair.

At first, mines provided minute samples nearly invisible to the human eye. But the debut of nuclear reactors let scientists make polonium 210 by the pound. The substance emits swarms of subatomic rays, and the Manhattan Project in 1945 used them to trigger the world’s first atom bombs. Such initiators became the global standard for basic nuclear arms.

President Eisenhower, eager to promote “atoms for peace,” had the high heats of polonium 210 turned into electricity for satellites. But the batteries lost power relatively fast because of the material’s short half-life, just 138 days. The United States made few such spacecraft.

By the 1960’s, researchers worried increasingly about polonium 210’s deadly health effects. Harvard researchers found it in cigarette smoke and argued that its concentrations were high enough to make its radioactivity a contributing factor in lung cancer.

Vilma R. Hunt, who helped lead the studies, called polonium 210 a nightmare for health workers, and perhaps sleuths, because it tended to move about in unexpected ways. “It crawls the walls,” she said in an interview. “It can be lost for a while and then come back.”

Though dangerous when breathed, injected or ingested, the material is harmless outside the human body. Skin or paper can stop its rays cold.

Industrial companies found polonium 210 to be ideal for making static eliminators that remove dust from film, lenses and laboratory balances, as well as paper and textile plants. Its rays produce an electric charge on nearby air. Bits of dust with static attract the charged air, which neutralizes them. Once free of static, the dust is easy to blow or brush away.

Manufacturers of antistatic devices take great pains to make the polonium hard to remove. Even so, Dr. Zimmerman of King’s College said it could be done with “careful lab work,” which he declined to describe.

The Health Physics Society, a professional group in McLean, Va., that distributes information on radiation safety, estimates that a lethal dose of polonium 210 is 3,000 microcuries (a radiation measure named after Marie and Pierre Curie). Other experts put the figure slightly higher.

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.

The company’s antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices.”

Last week, Russia’s top nuclear official said it exports 8 grams of polonium 210 a month, or 96 grams a year, to the United States. That is 3.4 ounces, which seems like a trifle but in theory is enough for thousands of lethal doses. He also said Russia had made no exports to Britain in the past five years. “Allegations that someone stole it during production are absolutely unfounded,” Sergei Kiriyenko, director of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency, said on Tuesday. “The controls are very tough.”

Russian officials have repeatedly called Mr. Litvinenko’s death part of a choreographed effort to discredit Mr. Putin. But despite such denials, British tabloids have tended to blame the Kremlin, and the affair has strained relations between London and Moscow.

Nuclear experts said the apparent origin of much of the world’s polonium 210 in Russia, including quantities used in American products, meant that investigations of the toxin’s provenance would probably reveal little. What would be surprising, the experts said, was if the radioactive toxin turned out to have been made or mined outside Russia.

Still, several experts held out the possibility that close examination of polonium 210 residues from Mr. Litvinenko’s body or from the multiple sites where it has been found around London might reveal nuclear fingerprints that could throw light on the baffling case.

“What they’ll be looking for is radioactive contaminants made at the same time,” said Dr. Happer of Princeton. “They’ll do the best they can technically,” hoping to find a match between the London samples and the known attributes of the world’s stocks of polonium 210. “But my guess,” he added, “is that it will take an informant” to clear up the mystery.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/weekinre...ef=weekinreview

This is scary. Real scary!

And from today's NYT,

December 3, 2006
There’s a Reason Russians Are Paranoid
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

MOSCOW

BEING prone to conspiracy theories, as Russians certainly are, doesn’t mean that someone is not conspiring against them.

That, in essence, has been the response here to the poisoning of Aleksandr V. Litvinenko, the secret agent turned exile in London who died on Nov. 23 — a case that only grew murkier last week with the discovery of radioactive traces aboard three British airplanes and another mysterious illness in Moscow.

Mr. Litvinenko’s slow end, the intrigue of his final healthy days, his deathbed statement accusing President Vladimir V. Putin of culpability (in English, some Russians noted suspiciously) — have nurtured a widely held view here that it was all indeed a conspiracy, only not the one embraced by Mr. Putin’s critics.

It was, from this point of view, not a plot by the Kremlin to silence a critic, but one by its enemies to discredit the Kremlin, the obvious suspects being Mr. Putin’s critics in exile or, of course, President Bush, the Central Intelligence Agency or the West (generally).

Or it could have been a plot by a faction inside the Kremlin to make it look as if a competing faction inside the Kremlin had done it.

“There is too much evidence” to think otherwise, said Stanislav A. Belkovsky, a political scientist here with ties to Mr. Putin’s Kremlin.

Actually, there is not much evidence at all, only questions and suspicions — which is, by the way, equally true of the accusations against Mr. Putin, no matter how fervently his critics believe them.

Every country has its conspiracy theories, of course, and the Spy vs. Spy dramas of the cold war and Hollywood have given life to a fair number of them. But they thrive here in the fertile ground of the Russian imagination as they do in few other places.

The Soviet Union’s leaders obsessed over conspiracies, real and imagined. They also rewrote history so regularly, fabricated so many economic reports extolling progress, covered up so many embarrassments like the Chernobyl disaster that few here ever believed they knew the whole truth about anything. And the absence of truth is where conspiracy theories take root.

This remains so, and Mr. Putin is at least partly to blame. He has stifled the news media, and the day-to-day operation of the Kremlin is again as opaque as it was in Soviet times. And there is the inconvenient fact that the Kremlin’s critics — including a number of journalists — keep dying in circumstances that investigators have yet to solve.

Mr. Putin’s entire presidency has been wrapped up in conspiracy theories, starting with his abrupt rise to power as Boris Yeltsin’s successor in 1999. That fall, a series of apartment bombings killed 243 people, fanning popular support for the second war in Chechnya, Russia’s separatist region. From the start, the bombings were viewed with suspicion, especially after the discovery of federal agents planting what turned out to be explosives in the basement of another building. (A training exercise, officials finally said.) In Russian politics, the violence clearly played to the advantage of hard-liners like Mr. Putin.

A vocal adherent of the theory that Russian secret services conspired to bomb their own citizens to bolster the Chechen war effort was Mr. Litvinenko, a former agent of the secret service he accused in a book he jointly wrote, “Blowing Up Russia: Terror From Within.” The book was published with the help of Boris A. Berezovsky, the self-exiled tycoon who lives in London and has become Mr. Putin’s fiercest critic (the feeling is, evidently, mutual).

Aleksei A. Venediktov, a radio host and executive editor of Ekho Moskvy, said the failure of the government to investigate the bombings thoroughly has nurtured distrust. In the same way, there are those who believe the authorities know more than they have told about the terrorist school siege in Beslan, in which 332 hostages and rescuers were killed in 2004.

“As long as the public is not informed, conspiracy theories will multiply and grow,” Mr. Venediktov said. “This does not mean there is no conspiracy.”

His theory? It was neither Mr. Putin nor the secret services. In fact, few here believe Russia’s leaders would have been so obvious as to use a radioactive isotope; it was used, instead, so people would think so!

Mr. Venediktov said a death squad working outside of government control killed Mr. Litvinenko to frighten the political elite into insisting that Mr. Putin, stay on for a third term whether he wants to or not. By law he must step down in 2008.

“The people who are behind this murder want to lay the responsibility in the future on Putin,” he said, in order to make him afraid to leave office lest he be prosecuted.

In the Russian press, where objectivity is as elusive as ever, even darker theories abound, almost always pointing the blame away from Mr. Putin’s Kremlin and back toward his accusers. Izvestia offered four on Thursday. According to one, Mr. Litvinenko was selling radioactive materials on the black market. Another: he and Mr. Berezovsky were making a nuclear bomb to help Chechnya’s separatists.

These theories about Mr. Litvinenko are not just ideas on the fringe. The chairman of the upper house of Parliament, Sergei M. Mironov, noted that the deaths of Mr. Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was murdered in October, took place on the eve of trips by Mr. Putin to Europe. “I do not think the coincidence was accidental,” he said.

When news emerged last week that Yegor T. Gaidar, a former prime minister and critic of Mr. Putin’s, had fallen ill a day after Mr. Litvinenko died, an ally of Mr. Gaidar’s, Anatoly B. Chubais, linked it to the deaths of Mr. Litvinenko and Ms. Politkovskaya, but not to Mr. Putin. Mr. Chubais, the head of Russia’s electric company, offered a grand conspiracy theory involving an attempted coup against Mr. Putin.

The logic behind the conspiracies — let alone the facts — can sometimes be hard to fathom, but a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, said that many people in London, exiles and their supporters, were all too ready to believe anything that reflected poorly on Russia. “It is a negative heritage of the old times,” he said.

Pressed, he suggested that “commercial interests” lay behind Mr. Litvinenko’s charges.

Even Mr. Putin himself struck a conspiratorial tone, questioning the origins of Mr. Litvinenko’s last statement. “If such a note really appeared before Mr. Litvinenko’s death, then a question arises: why this note was not made public when he was still alive?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/weekinreview/03myers.html

This would agree with your earlier post, Noonan.

Mine, too.

I think the one who did the anthrax did this- for the same reason

Wonder what magmak's take is on this?

I'm not magmak, but the anthrax episode(s) happened right after 9/11 and were, IMHO, just more gasoline on the fires of FEAR.

Once BushCo got the war machinery in gear, they didn't need anything else.

They have wanted this war since 1998.

They got it.

This is oh so very weird with the Russian Spies.

Technically, it could multiply to tens of thousands, then tens of millions if every person kissed or had sex with their spouse or mate and infected each other

Doubt it.

From what I've read, the only way P210 will kill you is if a lethal dose is INGESTED. With all the people testing for radioactivity, the fact that they are all alive suggests that this rather high-profile technique has pretty tight focus.

Now hear this - -

Friend says he knows who poisoned former Soviet spy
Story Highlights
•NEW: U.S.-based friend says he knows why ex-agent was murdered
•Investigators travel to Washington; others set to go to Moscow
•Italian man who met with Litvinenko still being tested for impact of radiation

LONDON, England (AP) -- A U.S.-based friend of a poisoned former Soviet KGB agent said he had given police the name of a suspect he believes orchestrated the killing of Alexander Litvinenko.

"The truth is, we have an act of international terrorism on our hands. I happen to believe I know who is behind the death of my friend Sasha (Litvinenko) and the reason for his murder," Yuri Shvets said in an exclusive interview with the AP by telephone from the United States.

Shvets, also a former KGB officer, said he had known Litvinenko, who died in London after he was exposed to a rare radioactive element, since 2002 and had spoken to him on November 23, the day he died.

He said he was questioned by Scotland Yard officers and an FBI agent in Washington last week. A police official in London, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case, confirmed officers had interviewed Shvets.

The official also said police expected to travel to Moscow within days, where a team of nine officers planned to interview several people, including Andrei Lugovoi, another former spy who met Litvinenko on November 1 -- the day he fell ill.

Home Secretary John Reid said Sunday the inquiry was expanding outside of Britain and would go wherever "the police take it."

Shvets declined to confirm the name of the person he had told police he believed was behind Litvinenko's death, or to offer details of a document he said he had given to the British officers.

"This is first hand information, this is not gossip. I gave them the first hand information that I have," Shvets told the AP.

He said he was not prepared to disclose further details, because of concern he could disrupt the inquiry.

"I want this inquiry to get to the bottom of it, otherwise they will be killing people all over the world -- in London, in Washington and in other places," Shvets said. "I want to give the police the time and space to crack this case, to allow them to find those behind this assassination, the last thing I want to do is give a warning to those who are responsible."

Shvets told the AP he had met Litvinenko in 2002, when both men were investigating incidents in the Ukraine. He said Litvinenko had introduced him to Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant. Scaramella met Litvinenko at a central London sushi bar on November 1 and has since been hospitalized. (Watch Scaramella say how he told spy they were both on a secret hit listVideo)

At the Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, in Washington, the former agent has spoken about his past as a KGB spy.

Shvets, who lives in Washington, said he was away from his home and in the U.S. on vacation, but would not confirm his precise location because of concern for his safety.

"I want to survive until the time we have a criminal case in relation to Sasha's death brought before a court in London," Shvets told the AP.

In a separate statement issued through Tom Mangold, a London-based former British Broadcasting Corp. reporter and friend for 15 years, Shvets denied claims published Sunday in Britain's Observer newspaper that he had been involved in the drafting of a dossier on Russian oil company Yukos.

Former Yukos shareholder Leonid Nevzlin, a Russian exile living in Israel, told the AP last week that Litvinenko had given him a document related to Yukos and said he believed the agent's killing was tied to his investigations into the company.

Mangold said Shvets had denied the newspaper report, which said he had examined charges filed by Russian prosecutors against Yukos officials and shareholders, handing his findings to Litvinenko.

Toxicologists found polonium-210, a rare radioactive substance, in Litvinenko's body before he died in London. Results of a post mortem examination on the 43-year-old's body are expected later this week.

Scaramella was undergoing hospital tests Sunday after he showed lower levels of the same radioactive substance. University College Hospital in a statement he was well and showing no external symptoms.

In an interview with Italy's RAI TG1 evening television news Scaramella said doctors had told him that his body contains five times the dose of polonium-210 considered deadly. "So my mood isn't the best," he told the channel. (Watch scientists working with polonium in a labVideo)

At their sushi bar meeting, Scaramella told Litvinenko an e-mail he received from a source named the purported killers of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was gunned down on October 7 at her Moscow apartment building. The e-mail reportedly said that he and Litvinenko -- a friend of the reporter -- were also on the hit list.

Litvinenko reported feeling unwell on November 1 and died three weeks later, his body withered, his hair fallen out and his organs ravaged.

Britain's Health Protection Agency said Sunday 27 people have now been referred for tests for possible radiation exposure. (Watch why British officials say there is no threat to public healthVideo)

Reid planned to discuss the case Monday at a meeting of European interior ministers in Brussels.

Litvinenko's funeral is expected to take place in London, but because of the levels of radiation in his body, the coffin will be sealed, Litvinenko's friend Alex Goldfarb said.

Britain's Sunday Times newspaper quoted Lugovoi on Sunday as saying he had also been contaminated with polonium-210, a claim contradicted by a report in Russia's Kommersant newspaper on Saturday.

Lugovoi was quoted as telling the Russian newspaper he and his family had tested for traces of radiation and been passed as "absolutely clean."

He denied that he and two business associates, Dmitri Kovtun and Vyacheslav Sokolenko, who met Litvinenko together on November 1, were involved in Litvinenko's death.

"We suspect that someone has been trying to frame us," the Sunday Times quoted Lugovoi as saying. "Someone passed this stuff onto us ... to point the finger at us and distract the police." He did not say whether he had fallen ill.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.



Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/12/03...p.ap/index.html

December 3, 2006
Britain Likely to Expand Inquiry Into Russian Ex-Spy’s Death
By ALAN COWELL

LONDON, Dec. 3 — The investigation into the poisoning of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B. operative, will likely broaden in coming days, Britain’s highest ranking law enforcement officer said today, and news reports said British counterterrorism officers were planning to fly to Moscow to interview witnesses.

Mr. Litvinenko died Nov. 23 of radiation poisoning, and a radioactive isotope, polonium 210, was found in his urine. Since then, the investigation into his death has led the police along a trail of places where traces of radiation were found — including British Airways airplanes flying to and from Moscow and several locations in central and north London.

The reported plan to send officers to Moscow has deepened speculation that the British police are looking increasingly to Moscow for information about the origins of the poison and the identity of people who may have been in contact with Mr. Litvinenko before his death. Mr. Litvinenko had, since the late 1990s, become a staunch critic of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The possible Russian connection has already spilled into the realms of diplomacy. Senior Russian officials have complained to their British counterparts about the publication of a death-bed testament by Mr. Litvinenko accusing Mr. Putin of responsibility for the poisoning, according to a British official who spoke in return for anonymity under civil service rules. Still, Moscow has said it will cooperate in the British investigation.

Shortly before his death, Mr. Litvinenko secured British citizenship, according to his associates, and that has raised the diplomatic stakes, particularly if foreign agents were responsible for his death, which would make it an assassination on British soil.

In a television interview today, Britain’s head law enforcement official, Home Secretary John Reid, said, “The police will follow wherever this investigation leads inside or outside of Britain.”

He added, “Over the next few days, I think all of these things, I think, will widen out a little from the circle just being here in Britain.”

News reports in Moscow and London said nine British counterterrorism officers planned to fly to Moscow to interview people, possibly including Andrei Lugovoi, a former K.G.B. agent. Mr. Lugovoi met with Mr. Litvinenko on several occasions, including Nov. 1, when Mr. Litvinenko began feeling unwell.

Radioactive traces have been found in the Pine Bar of the Mayfair Millennium Hotel, where the two men met. Mr. Lugovoi was quoted in The Sunday Times of London as saying he had been framed by people laying a false trail for the police to follow.

Mr. Litvinenko also met Nov. 1 with an Italian contact, Mario Scaramella, who has since then tested positive for radioactive traces.

In a statement today, the University College Hospital in London said that Mr. Scaramella remained “well” and that the results of pathology tests showed no abnormalities.

For his part, Mr. Scaramella has said the contamination is evidence that he, too, was a target like Mr. Litvinenko. “I have reason to believe that the poisoning of myself and Litvinenko may be connected to information that Litvinenko himself, for months, had transmitted to me,” Mr. Scaramella said in a statement to the Italian news media, according to Reuters.

British newspapers today carried lengthy reports that suggested the narrative was becoming not only murkier, but ever broader. One report said the British officers had interviewed a former K.G.B. officer in Washington, identified as Yuri Shvets, about a dossier on the Yukos oil company affair — in which the company’s former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, has been imprisoned for tax evasion. Leonid Nevzlin, an exiled Russian oil tycoon living in Israel, has said in interviews with two news organizations that Mr. Litvinenko had passed him a dossier on the company.

Another report in The Observer quoted a Russian academic living in London, Julia Svetlichnaya,- as saying Mr. Litvinenko told her he planned to make a living blackmailing Russian billionaires and spies. Ms. Svetlichnaya did not respond immediately to an e-mailed request for comment on the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/03/world/eu...artner=homepage

Thing I don't get is if this stuff is so "mobile". Meaning they find they cannot contain it. Why would it stay in the human body and not migrate else where? Or would it remain long enough to create the damage? Also if they find it almost uncontainable why would anyone be allowed to make or use it in Industrial or Commercial products? Seems the substance should be banned.

Well is DOES have industrial uses.

Very little is produced.

Even though it IS MOBILE, you have to actually ingest it to get harmed.

It may not be banned, but it IS TIGHTLY CONTROLLED.

Not that that matters.

Magmak1 doesn't have a take on this story.

There's only so many things you can follow in depth at one time, and this one didn't make my list of higher priorities.

But here's my opening primer:

1) The "Russian scene" is so complex that one would have to be employed full time to keep up with it.

2) In addition to the "state", and various state agencies, and various factions with those, and likely factions within the factions, one would have to be an embedded journalist to begin to have a clue.

3) If or once embedded, you'd be part of the problem, or in danger, or both.

4) I don't think you can talk about Russia, or this situation/mystery, without bringing in "organized crime" in one or more of its factions.

5) All of the above have probably been infiltrated to a great extent by others.

6) There's a lot at stake for a lot of "players" on the international scene, whether states, crime syndicates, or their hybrids.

7) Solving this mystery is akin to playing the pea-and-shell game with a very large set of Russian nesting dolls.

Hence my failure to get engaged with it...

This case makes 9/11 look like a simple game of Clue.

I don't think it's that complex.

Colonel Mustard in the Study with the lead pipe.