Alexandr Litvenenko killed by polonium 210!

I've come late to the party I know and I admit I have not read the previous posts.

Anyone comment, though, on the feckless response by the UK to a state sponsored ( Russian) assassination within its borders?

What does it mean for any sovereign state to, effectively, allow such actions?

'Russian spy poisoned me' says former double agent Gordievsky

The Scotsman
07 April 2008

AN ALLEGED attempt to kill a former Russian spy who defected to Britain was being investigated by police last night.
Oleg Gordievsky was admitted to a hospital in Guildford after falling ill in November last year. And yesterday he claimed he had been poisoned with the highly toxic metal thallium in a botched assassination attempt.

Gordievsky, a KGB double agent who spied on Russia for British intelligence during the 1980s, claims he was targeted by a Russian assassin who visited him at his safe house in Surrey.

The 69-year-old was unconscious for 34 hours after falling ill last year and spent a two weeks recuperating in a private clinic reportedly paid for by his former bosses in MI6.

Mr Gordievsky, who was initially left partially paralysed by the alleged attack and still has no feeling in his fingers, was reported as saying: "I've known for some time that I am on the assassination list drawn up by rogue elements in Moscow.

"They murdered my friend Alexander Litvinenko. I have no doubt my sudden illness last November was a similar attempt on my life.

"The targets for assassination are well known. First Boris Berezovsky (the multi-millionaire oligarch living in exile in the UK], next the prime minister of Chechnya, then Litvinenko and then I was fourth. Now I remain third."

And Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was an outspoken critic of the war in Chechnya, was found shot dead in Moscow in October 2006.

Forensic tests have so far failed to identify the poison or any other suspicious substance that could have been responsible for the former spy's illness.

But Mr Gordievsky, who was the KGB station chief at the Soviet embassy in London, claims his attackers would have used a variant or derivative of thallium.

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