British Justice vs. Kremlin Impunity: The Polonium-Poisoning Murder of a Russian Exile and Putin Critic in 2006 Finally Gets a Public Inquest. By Sohrab Ahmari
http://www.wsj.com/articles/sohrab-ahmari-british-justice-versus-kremlin-impunity-1422565632?mod=hp_opinion
“It has been described as one of the most dangerous post-mortem examinations ever undertaken in the Western world, and I think that’s probably right.”
So testified forensic pathologist Nathaniel Cary on Wednesday, the second day of the inquiry into the 2006 poisoning death of Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko. The proceeding, held at the Royal Courts of Justice, aims to examine the circumstances under which Litvinenko was murdered with radioactive polonium-210, a highly unusual poison and one of many Hollywood-ready elements of the case that has made it a tabloid fixture for nearly a decade.
Some aspects of the inquiry have a definite cloak-and-dagger feel. Also on Wednesday, journalists were barred from the room at one point so that “Scientist A1,” whose day job is to help maintain the U.K. nuclear deterrent, could testify about the deadly substance. The press was ushered into a separate annex, where Scientist A1 could be heard but not seen.
The details of the case largely are more prosaic, when they’re not confusing for a lay audience. The top-secret Scientist A1 was there to tell the inquiry that “one gram of polonium-210 emits one-six-six, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero, zero-zero-zero alpha particles per sec—”
“Pausing right there,” an exasperated barrister interrupted, inadvertently triggering laughter in the courtroom and the press annex. “I may be wrong, but 166 quadrillion per second?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Scientist A1 replied.
Such arcane details are essential to understanding the case. These alpha particles ravaged Litvinenko’s body from the inside out after he drank tea laced with polonium-210 on Nov. 1, 2006.
He’d been meeting at a posh London hotel with a fellow alumnus of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, and a Russian businessman. Later that day Litvinenko fell ill with nausea and diarrhoea. Soon his hair fell out, his lips thinned to nothing and his face shriveled.
After years of loyal service to the FSB and its predecessor, the KGB, Litvinenko and other FSB colleagues in 1998 held a news conference during which they charged that “the FSB is being used by certain officials solely for their private purposes. It’s being used for settling scores and carrying out private and criminal orders for payment.” Here was an insider laying bare the ugly workings of the new mafia state that had replaced Communism.
The FSB response was swift. Litvinenko was expelled from the service, and prosecutors charged him with “exceeding his official authority.” After being jailed for seven months, he was cleared of that charge, then briefly detained again. His phone was tapped. Prosecutors vowed to bring one fabricated charge after another, as his widow, Marina, told me last year.
The family escaped in 2000 to the U.K., where Litvinenko continued his activism and, his widow says, began cooperating with the British secret service, MI6. In 2002, he published a book alleging that Vladimir Putin had staged a series of Moscow bombings in 1999 and blamed Chechen rebels, all as part of a ploy to ascend the Kremlin throne. Four years later, Russian lawmakers enacted laws authorizing the targeting of state enemies abroad.
Just over three weeks after he drank that fateful tea, Litvinenko was dead. Yet as the testimony at the inquiry on Wednesday made clear, the cause eluded his physicians for almost the entire course of his illness, and would have remained a mystery but for toxicologist John Henry ’s hunch that radiation poisoning may have been to blame—a testament to the assassins’ sophistication and determination to hide their craft. (Henry died in 2007.)
Dr. Cary, the pathologist, described the horrors of polonium poisoning. “It gets into your body . . . ,” he said, “it’s distributed round your body; any cell next door to where it’s distributed is badly affected by the continuous bombardment of alpha rays.” Soon after Litvinenko drank the poisoned tea his body ceased producing the white blood cells responsible for fighting infections and tissue damage. Eventually he suffered complete organ failure.
It’s lucky that other visitors to the bar where Litvinenko took his deadly tea weren’t contaminated, since investigators subsequently picked up traces of polonium-210 all along the trail the suspected assassins took back to Russia. Those suspects, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, didn’t attend Wednesday’s hearing and aren’t expected to participate in the nine-week inquiry.
After an investigation involving a hundred or so uniformed officers and another hundred detectives, U.K. prosecutors in 2007 charged Mr. Lugovoi with murder in absentia. Both have repeatedly denied the allegations, and Moscow has refused to extradite them. “I couldn’t care less about what’s happening there,” Mr. Lugovoi, now a member of the Duma, has told Russian media.
The independent inquiry is an effort to provide the comprehensive airing of facts that a criminal trial ordinarily would have done, had the defendants in this case been available to participate in one. Though intended to be painstakingly fair, it will be largely symbolic. And it will help bring closure to Marina, who has been relentless in seeking justice for her late husband.
Yet even this symbolic reckoning with the realities of Mr. Putin’s Russia was delayed at the behest of a British political class that had been eager not to ruffle his feathers. British Home Secretary Theresa May wrote in a 2013 letter to judiciary that “international relations”—a euphemism for relations with Moscow—“have been a factor in the government’s decision-making.”
Now, after the annexation of Crimea, the assault on eastern Ukraine and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, things have changed. The result, if all goes according to plan, will be a complete public record of the Litvinenko case—at last.
Mr. Ahmari is a Journal editorial-page writer based in London.
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