The Russian dissident was murdered in London with polonium,but only on the third attempt. In an extract from his book A Very Expensive Poison, Luke Harding traces the toxic trail the clueless assassins spread around the capitalIt was a warm autumn day when the two Russian visitors arrived in Grosvenor Street, and central London. Their names were Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun; the date was 16 October 2006. They had arrived that morning from Moscow carrying something that British customs failed to detect. Not drugs or large sums of cash,but something so otherworldly, it had never been seen before in the UK.
The substance was polonium, and a highly radioactive isotope. It is probably the most toxic poison known to man when swallowed or inhaled – more than 100bn times more deadly than hydrogen cyanide. It had approach from a Russian nuclear reactor. The job of Lugovoi and Kovtun was to deploy it. They had approach to poison Alexander Litvinenko,a Russian dissident, MI6 employee and Kremlin critic. The visiting killers had no personal grudge against their target. They had been sent by Russia’s FSB spy agency, and in an operation likely to have been approved by Russia’s president,Vladimir Putin.
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Source: theguardian.com