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A retired Russian military intelligence officer has fallen ill in England after exposure to an unknown substance. Does that sound familiar?
A man identified by local news reports as a retired Russian military intelligence officer who once spied for Britain is critically ill at a British hospital, and the authorities were investigating his "exposure to an unknown substance."
According to several reports, the man, found unconscious on a bench in the city of Salisbury, is Sergei V. Skripal, 66. He was once jailed by Moscow, then settled in Britain after an exchange of spies between the United States and Russia in 2010.
The British police have not publicly identified the man in the hospital or a 33-year-old woman who fell sick with him at a shopping mall called the Maltings.
The authorities have, however, released enough detail about what they called a "major incident" to draw some comparisons, however premature, to the case of Alexander V. Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who was poisoned in London in 2006.
(Score: 0, Troll) by cocaine overdose on Tuesday March 06 2018, @03:05PM (2 children)
I can attest to this. Londongrad is to Russians what America is to Americans, from all of the opinions I've heard.
On the poisonings, I also agree. It came to mind that the UK is much closer to Russia than the US, and may be easier to "sneak" -- or waltz in, looking at their travel policies -- in illicit activities. The bigger problem here, is that these poisonings are like a proto-"Russia rigged the elections." The validity is in question, because of the very overt bias. There is little to be surmised from this, besides maybe someone somewhere wants it to look like Russia is poisoning spies. Much less if these poisonings happened at all or that the UK didn't poison these agents themselves. Not without a very lucrative "keep your mouth shut" deal, of course.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:04PM (1 child)
Litvinenko was a particular brazen killing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko [wikipedia.org]
There's a bit of Occam's razor involved here. Russia has shown itself to assassinate certain Russians within and outside its borders, especially critics of Putin (not sure if that applies to this man, although by spying for a foreign power might be the one worse thing you can do). I guess we'll know more once it's announced what substance was used in this case.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by cocaine overdose on Tuesday March 06 2018, @09:12PM
Yes, and that's what strikes me as off. One off-hand theory is that Kovton and Lugovoy were unsuspecting vectors, and not the masterminds, or even pawns, of the assassination. That is, after you throw out much of that Wikipedia page, because the sources are not good. There are numerous (~21) references to BBC. Those referenced articles themselves, have no references. The same for the Telegraph articles (~10), one important one being the waiter's (Norberto Andrade) first-hand account. His words: "when I was delivering gin and tonic to the table, I was obstructed. I couldn't see what was happening, but it seemed very deliberate to create a distraction. It made it difficult to put the drink down." Despite the lack of objective substance -- as Andrade himself seems to be the victim of memory bias/contamination, speaking of "I think the polonium was sprayed into the teapot. There was contamination found on the picture," which makes it seem like he's rationalized his memories to be inline with the current media -- this story was repeated by almost all major news agencies at that time. The referenced article did not have any substantive explanations or references.
The same can be said for the medical evidence, of which I have yet to find any references for. I'm not specialized in the specifics needed to discern whether he was poisoned by Po-210, but I can see nothing but hearsay in the Wikipedia article. A reference, even if in unintelligible jargon, of testing methods and results would be better than quoting a book by two KGB dissidents. For the health references, it's all news sources. 11 articles from the Guardian, 3 from CNN, and many from smaller groups. Hell, just about the entire "Polonium Trial" section is from a memoir -- by Litvineko and another Putin dissident.
There are no official sources with evidence, it's all just one big hallway with people yelling at the top of their lungs and everything echoing off the walls. The only real source is from an official inquiry conducted by a High Court Judge.[0] Within which there is second-hand reference to evidence. Notably, the key determinant of determining that Po-210 was involved -- involved in the scenes, not Litvineko's body, as it was pointed out.. "A1 stated that in the light of laboratory tests using both alpha and gamma spectrometry, she was absolutely confident in the conclusion that the alpha radiation discovered at the multiple scenes had been caused by polonium 210," but the source for this is dead. I'm not knowledgeable in spectrometry, but evidence would have been more appreciated, and carried more weight, than an anonymous "I'm confident it's Po-210." Which coincides well with the judge's final statement of "I am sure that Mr Lugovoy and Mr Kovtun placed the polonium 210 in the teapot at the Pine Bar on 1 November 2006," which seems to based solely on the closing statement of the lawyer representing the Metropolitan Police Service, and not the actual officers doing the investigation.
I will add that I didn't read the entire thing. But from these points above, I will conclude that it is an entire shitshow and on par with "Russia hacked the elections."
[0]http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090753/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/files/Litvinenko-Inquiry-Report-web-version.pdf