The Public Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko opened today under the Chairmanship of Sir Robert Owen.
Ben Emerson QC representing Marina Litvinenko the widow of Alexander, said in his opening address that the murder was” An act of nuclear terrorism on the streets of a major city which put the lives of numerous other members of the public at risk”.
Quite so, and I wrote about that in an article entitled, The Murder of Alexander Litvinenko published for the magazine Freedom Today in early 2008. You can read the article by clicking on this link.
I first met Mr Litvinenko in March 2006. He wanted to tell me about the alleged links of a senior European politician and former President of the European Commission to the KGB. I explain the full background to this in the article, and I state there seven years ago what is being said now, that his murder was “an act of state sponsored terrorism”.
Mr Litvinenko was due to come to the European Parliament at my invitation to give a talk in October 2006, but the meeting had to be delayed. He was then murdered in November. I cannot say that the two were linked but Alexander was an increasingly outspoken critic, with inside knowledge, of President Putin’s gangster regime.
I point out that such a murder using nuclear materials could only have been authorized at the highest level. This is not a new phenomenon; murder by sophisticated and usually untraceable poisons, nuclear or otherwise, has been a speciality of the Russian state since the earliest days of the Communist regime. Author Boris Volodarsky has written in detail about this in his book The KGB’s Poison Factory.
A number of other Russians and Georgians have met mysterious and unexplained deaths in the UK since 2006. The Government has done all it can to hinder the inquiry in Mr Litvinenko’s death, and have taken little or no action to explain these other deaths.
Our country is so weak now that we cower before the Putin’s regime and desperately don’t want to deter the Russian gangsters who bring their vast wealth to London.
Let’s hope that the current enquiry actually does pin the blame on those who killed Mr Litvinenko and gives some kind of justice for his widow Marina
