The report by a British inquiry reads like something from a Hollywood thriller — an opposition leader killed via nuclear poison because he was blowing the whistle on a top Russian official for being a pedophile. But it’s indeed not the work of fiction, but a real British report.
The victim: Alexander Litvinenko, whose image of him lying in bed has been dominating the Internet. The alleged killer: Russian Presidend Vladmir Putin, accused of being the epitome of an evil James Bond movie villain.
A prominent Russian dissident was assassinated in London with a deadly dose of radioactive poison because he had claimed that Vladimir Putin was a pedophile, according to an independent British inquiry.
The hit was “probably” carried out on the personal orders of the Russian president.
The allegation—that Putin had used his position as head of the Russian intelligence service to destroy video evidence of himself having sex with underage boys—was “the climax” of an increasingly bitter personal feud between Alexander Litvinenko and the Kremlin leader.Sir Robert Owen, a retired High Court judge, found that this personal animosity, combined with Litvinenko’s continued criticism of the Kremlin and the FSB, of which he was once a senior member, was the motive behind his brazen murder in a Mayfair hotel via a pot of green tea laced with the radioactive isotope polonium-210 in November 2006.
“The FSB operation to kill Mr. Litvinenko was probably approved by Mr. Patrrushev, then head of the FSB, and also by President Putin,” Owen told the Royal Courts of Justice on Thursday.
“There was undoubtedly a personal dimension to the antagonism between Mr. Litvinenko on the one hand and President Putin on the other,” he wrote in his report. “Mr. Litvinenko made repeated highly personal attacks on President Putin culminating in the allegation of pedophillia in July 2006.”
The claim was made in an article on the Chechen separatist website Chechenpress shortly after Putin was filmed lifting the T-shirt and kissing the stomach of a young boy at the Kremlin.
Litvinenko claimed this display of affection was the first public sign of a secret that had long been known by some within the KGB. He said Putin had been denied a place in the foreign intelligence division as a young recruit “because, shortly before his graduation, his bosses learned that Putin was a pedophile.”
Her’s a copy of that article.
The New York Times notes that Litvineko had been a whistle-blower batting corruption in Moscow’s security forces, and even though his death instilled a chill in British-Russian relations, it didn’t derail the two countries long term interests with Russia.
Judge Owen did not provide any direct evidence linking Mr. Putin or any other high-level Russian officials to the killing, and he acknowledged that he had based his findings on “strong circumstantial evidence of Russian state responsibility.” That included the likely origin of the polonium that was used to poison Mr. Litvinenko being a Russian reactor, and the fact that there were “powerful motives for organizations and individuals within the Russian state to take action” against him.
“We regret that the strictly criminal case has been politicized and has darkened the general atmosphere of bilateral relations,” said Maria Zakharova, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Moscow, the news agency Interfax reported. “Certainly, we need some time to thoroughly analyze the contents of this document, after which we will issue our detailed review.”
Speaking after the release of the report, Mr. Litvinenko’s widow, Marina, called for the expulsion of Russian intelligence officers from London and the imposition of targeted economic sanctions against individuals including Mr. Putin and his former spy chief, Nikolai Patrushev.
Sitting beside her at a news conference, Ms. Litvinenko’s lawyer, Ben Emmerson, said it would be “craven” of Prime Minister David Cameron to fail to respond to what he called “nuclear terrorism” on the streets of London.
In Parliament, the home secretary, Theresa May, called Mr. Litvinenko’s death “a blatant and unacceptable breach of the most fundamental tenets of international law and civilized behavior,” while also noting that Russia’s apparent role “does not come as a surprise.”
Commenting on the extraordinary and unfounded allegations, Sir Robert wrote: “It hardly needs saying that the allegations made by Mr Litvinenko against President Putin in this article were of the most serious nature. Could they have had any connection with his death?”
The judge’s 300-page report concludes that Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun poisoned the 43-year-old with radioactive polonium 210 at a Mayfair hotel in 2006.
It found that there is a “strong probability” that the Russian secret service directed the killing, and that operation was “probably approved” by Mr Putin.
Sir Robert said there were “several reasons” why the Russian state may have wanted to kill Mr Litvinenko by late 2006.
“There was undoubtedly a personal dimension to the antagonism between Mr Litvinenko on the one hand and President Putin on the other,” he added.
Officials in Moscow have always denied involvement in Mr Litvinenko’s death, with officials previously claiming he was involved in an illicit trade in polonium and poisoned himself.
The Russian Foreign Ministry dismissed Sir Robert’s report as “politically motivated” today and warned that it would overshadow relations with the UK.
“We need time to study in detail the contents of this document, and then give a detailed assessment,” a spokesperson said.
“We would like to note that Russia’s position on this issue remains unchanged and is well known…there was no reason to expect the final report of a politically engaged and highly opaque process to be objective and impartial.
This story falls into one where a)there are allegations which remain allegations but b)it’s almost intellectual negligence not to connect the dots.
Photo: “Vladimir Putin-5 edit” by Kremlin.ru. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladimir_Putin-5_edit.jpg#/media/File:Vladimir_Putin-5_edit.jpg
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.