Who is Alexander Litvinenko and why did anyone want to kill him? Apparently, he was privy to high-level corruption in the KGB (now FSB). He was also critical of President Putin’s policy towards break-away Chechnya,
claiming that the series of explosions that destroyed apartment blocks and killed hundreds of residents in Moscow in the 1990s were the handiwork of the FSB, but blamed by Putin’s government on Chechens to incite Russian public anger against them and justify the subsequent invasion of Chechnya.

Litvinenko was also in close contact with the Russian investigative journalist Anna Polikovskaya, who was shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block in Moscow last October.
She was also pursuing stories about high-level government corruption and about Putin’s genocidal policy toward the Chechens.

July-2009-Prize-winning activist Natalya Estemirova, 50, worked for the leading Russian rights group Memorial, which has exposed a string of abuses in the conflict-torn region.
Her corpse, "with firearms wounds to the head and chest," was found close to a highway in the region of Ingushetia that neighbours Chechnya, said the investigative committee of Russian prosecutors. Her murder was the latest in a series of killings of rights defenders and investigative journalists in Russia that have shocked the world, most notably the 2006 killing of reporter Anna Politkovskaya.

Back to Alexander Litvinenko. The suspicion is that Litvinenko was poisoned on orders of some people in Moscow , either the Russian Mafia, or some rogue elements in the FSB (nee KGB), or President Putin himself. This suspicion was reinforced when British forensic police, after examining dozens of British Airways jetliners, found traces of Polonium 210 in three BA aircraft that plied the Moscow-London route in the days immediately before Litvinenko fell ill and was hospitalized, airplanes which neither Litvinenko nor his Italian friend Scaramella took.

The conclusion is hard to avoid that the two (ex) Russian FSB agents smuggled the Polonium 210 to London , used it to poison Litvinenko, then flew home to Moscow . But on whose orders, is still open to speculation. It does not bolster President Putin’s innocence to know that he was head of the KGB during the Soviet era. One of the FSB agents has been found positive for Polonium 210, as were the BA aircraft that he took from Moscow to London , then back to Moscow . The plot thickens.

Poisoning opponents and critics is standard operational procedure with the KGB/FSB. Last year, the popular pro-Western presidential candidate in the Ukraine elections was poisoned. Fortunately, he survived to be elected president, but his face was markedly disfigured. About ten years ago, a prominent defector from Bulgaria was killed while standing on a London kerb waiting for the bus. He had been pricked in the leg with an umbrella tipped with a needle laced with ricin, a poison derived from the pod of the castor bean, for which there is no known antidote. .