The Next Litvinenko Another Russian whistleblower is poisoned in Britain.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-litvinenko-1489532670
Watch what you eat, please. That’s our plea to Russian defectors as evidence mounts that the death of a U.K.-based whistleblower may have been caused by poisoned soup.
Alexander Perepilichny was jogging in Surrey in November 2012 when he collapsed and died. Investigators initially blamed natural causes, though there was reason to suspect foul play in his death at age 44.
Perepilichny had been cooperating with a Swiss probe into Russian money laundering and official corruption. He had also offered information in the case of Sergei Magnitsky—the lawyer who died in a Moscow prison in 2009 after blowing the whistle on Russian corruption—to the fund that hired Magnitsky. Perepilichny had received death threats from the Russian underworld, according to police investigators.
A formal inquest into the Perepilichny case was launched in 2014, but it hasn’t gotten under way in part due to delays over the disclosure of U.K. government intelligence. Lawyers for Perepilichny’s life insurer told a pre-inquest hearing Monday that traces of a deadly toxin derived from the gelsemium plant had been found in his stomach. Police experts discovered the substance but concluded it was sorrel from a soup. The inquest, which formally begins June 5, must examine whether the gelsemium was substituted for the harmless sorrel.
This echoes the 2006 murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian intelligence defector who died in London after being poisoned with polonium, along with the more recent case of Vladimir Kara-Murza, the opposition activist who recently survived his second poisoning in as many years. Perepilichny’s family, not to mention the British public, deserve to know whether Russian authorities have perpetrated a second such crime.
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