There’s yet another case of someone who wasn’t a buddie of Russian President Vladmir Putin having been on an assassin’s list — only this time British authorities averted it:
The murder of a second Russian dissident on British soil was averted last month when police and intelligence agencies intercepted a suspected killer in London, it was confirmed last night.
In a move likely to damage already strained relations between Britain and Russia, Scotland Yard said that officers arrested a man on suspicion of conspiracy to murder on June 21 and held him for two days. He was later handed over to the immigration service and deported back to Russia.
The man arrived in London in mid-June allegedly with orders to murder the billionaire Russian exile Boris Berezovsky, a staunch opponent of President Putin, who has been granted asylum to live in Britain.
Ahhh. It’s probably just a concidence…MORE:
Yesterday Mr Berezovsky blamed Mr Putin personally for the failed murder plot. He also repeated the charge that the Russian leader was responsible for the murder of Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence officer killed by a lethal dose of polonium-210, a radioactive isotope. “It is Putin personally behind this plot, Litvinenko and mine,†said Mr Berezovsky.
However, in a letter to The Times, Yury Fedotov, the Russian Ambassador to London, said that it was preposterous to assert that the killing of Litvinenko “appears to have the clear backing of the Russian Governmentâ€.
He wrote: “The Russian Government values its relations with the UK and respects its laws and con- stitutional arrangements.”
The alleged murder plot would have been planned as Tony Blair, then the Prime Minister, held a tense meeting with Mr Putin at the G8 summit in Germany on June 8. It came in the wake of the British Government’s formal request to Russia for the extradition of Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB operative, for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the dissident, in London in November last year. The Russians have refused to extradite Mr Lugovoy.
Coincidence? One fact is that some of Mr. Putin’s foes have suddenly experienced shorter life expectancies…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.