From Russia with poison: Death of the inconvenient

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n the latest James Bond movie Casino Royale, ‘M’, while struggling with the complexities of terror financing, comments how she misses Cold War. The recent incident of the poisoning of an ex-Russian Spy in London suggests that her real life counterparts wouldn’t have to wait long for its return. Forty-three-year-old Alexandar Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent, died on the night of November 23 at the University College Hospital of London after apparently being poisoned by a radioactive element polonium-210. The ex-Russian spy complained of feeling sick on November 1, after he met two Russian men at a London hotel, one of them a former KGB officer. He also met Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant, at a sushi bar where he is believed to have received documents about Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s death. Litvinenko was transferred to the University college hospital in Central London after his condition worsens on November 17. On November 19, it was reported that he was poisoned with thallium. His condition deteriorated and he died on November 23 in the intensive care unit of the hospital. Doctors attending Litvinenko failed to identify the cause of symptoms that reduced the healthy and fit agent to virtually a ghost with his organs failing one by one. On November 24, health experts said that the ex-spy might have been deliberately poisoned by a radioactive matter, believed to be polonium-210.