Litvinenko

A lot of my readers* have been emailing me asking why I haven't yet blogged about Litvinenko's poisoning.

(*All of them in fact. No one reads this blog.)

I have been following this case like a hawk, of course. I'm decidedly anti-Putin and I see the connection between Litvinenko and Politkovskaya as further evidence against Putin. (Can you believe that fucker dismissed her assasination by noting that her work as a journalist was inconsequential?)

So, the story for those of my readers who haven't been following it*:

(*Again, an empty set)

Litvinenko stumbles into a London hospital after a shitload of vomiting. 10 days later, he's lost all his hair. Litvinenko accuses the Kremlin of beging behind his apparent poisoning. Doctors struggle to identify whatever it is that's killing him. They fail; it kills him. They detect Polonium 210 in an unnatrually high concentration.

Polonium, it turns out, isn't available to anyone who doesn't have a nuclear reactor.

The Britts then start combing London for more of this Polonium and find it in minute traces everywhere Litvinenko has been.

His timeline is here.

Some of the controversy has revolved around Mario Scaramella who met Litvinenko for lunch at a sushi bar on the day of his poisoning. Scaramella has been accussed of being behind the poisoning, which he vehemently denies, since the two were friends and on the "same side" in the investigation into Politkovskaya's murder -- and because the topic of the conversation was a hit list from the Kremlin that Scaramella had gotten wind of... Scaramella was on it. Scaramella also says that Litvinenko did not eat anything

Today, Scaramella was found to have some amount of Po 210 in his system. (Traces or lots? Don't know.)

The rest of the controversy has been over the meeting that Litvinenko had with two former KGB agents in a London hotel on the day of his poisoning. It's a classic case of "you done it" -- Just like the dioxin poisoning of Ukranian candidate Victor Yushchenko two years ago.

Polonium 210 was found both at the hotel where Litvinenko met the KGB agents, and at the sushi bar where he met Scaramella afterwards. I'm no genius, but seems to me like the poison simply followed Litvinenko around with him -- he shed some at the hotel and then later he shed some at the sushi bar. This clears Scaramella's name.