The recent poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko is but the latest in a line of elaborate and mysterious deaths, explains Eva Dadrian Ten days ago, a former colonel in the Russian secret service and a critic of President Vladimir Putin died of radiation poisoning attributed to polonium-210, a substance normally used as part of the triggering device for atomic weapons. On his death bed, Litvinenko the Russian blamed President Putin for instigating his murder using a deadly poison and called him "barbaric and ruthless". Alexander Litvinenko used to work for the Federal Security Bureau, the former KGB. Back in 1998, he fell out of favour with the government after he publicly accused his superiors of ordering him to kill Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Condemned to spend nine months in jail on charges of "abuse of office", he was acquitted in 2000. But an acquittal in the world of any secret agent offers no safe guarantee, especially in the turbulent years of the post-Soviet Russian state, so Litvinenko defected to Britain and sought political asylum. His defection made him a traitor in the eyes of his former colleagues and bosses. But was that a good enough reason to get rid of him? Had he revealed too many Russian state secrets? Was his criticism of Putin too outspoken? Or was it because he just knew too much about the covert operations of the Kremlin and the mysterious killings of Putin's opponents and critics? This may sound like a plot fit for a new James Bond movie, but this latest crime reminds us of several similar "political murders" which to this day remain unresolved. The first one that comes to mind is that of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian prize-winning author and broadcaster who was assassinated in London in 1978. Markov, who had defected to the West in 1969, was a BBC World Service journalist and a fierce critic of the communists especially of the then Bulgarian communist leader Todor Zhivkov. He died as a result of a platinium-iridium pellet containing Ricin either "fire" or "injected" from an umbrella tip as he was waiting at a bus stop. Although no one has ever been charged with Markov's murder, it is widely believed that the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB were behind it. The case remains open to this day and though 10 volumes of material relating to Markov's death have been destroyed by the former Bulgarian intelligence, the current Bulgarian government has promised to continue the investigation into the case. Politically inspired murders are neither recent nor confined to Muscovan plotting. For almost three decades, the CIA and Cuban exiles based in Little Havana, Florida, have been trying to devise ways to assassinate Fidel Castro. From poison pills to toxic cigars and from pen-syringes to bacterial-poison sprayed handkerchiefs and exploding molluscs, all been tried by the CIA to dispose of Castro, and if none of these "imaginative" biochemical assassination devices have yet succeeded, others have reached their objective. The disposal of political rivals or "undesirable" leaders has been common practice since the Greek philosopher Socrates was ordered to drink a chalice of hemlock, another notorious biochemical poison derived from the hemlock plant. While the nature of the poison that killed Litvinenko is still a subject of speculation -- some toxicologists have suggested that it may have come from a secret Russian chemical weapons facility -- the use of radioactive poisons, similar to the polonium-210, may be more widespread than previously thought and used by several secret bodies. Ricin, which is believed to have caused the death of Georgi Markov in 1978, is a political poison of twentieth-century origin. According to biochemical experts, Ricin is found in the shell casing of "castor beans and is easily produced, thus having the potential to be a large-scale murder weapon". Some of the toxic substances used in such biochemical political assassinations dissolve instantly in liquids and can't be forensically detected in the human body once 12 hours have passed since its ingestion. They can cause fatal symptoms in the blood circulation, destroy the nervous and digestive systems and cause kidney failure. These were the symptoms diagnosed by the French doctors who treated the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the military hospital where he was admitted in 2004. The findings of the autopsy conducted on Arafat have been classified as top secret and not officially released, but a British intelligence report disclosed that Arafat may have been poisoned with "Acontine", a widely known toxic substance. Israel had threatened to kill Arafat repeatedly but despite having escaped 13 assassination plots, including three poisoning attempts, Abu Ammar could not be "publicly assassinated" like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdul-Aziz Al-Rantissi. Unfortunately not all these biochemical poisons have antidotes, but some do and when Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was injected with poison in the Jordanian capital Amman by a Mossad agent, who was later caught, Israel was forced to provide Jordan with the antidote that saved Mashaal's life. These are hardly rare cases. Through the past century we've had biological agents to induce all sorts of ailments from Tularaemia (rabbit fever) to Brucellosis (undulant fever). Mortal diseases as different as anthrax, smallpox and tuberculosis can be used by shady agencies to wreak havoc. Or perhaps you'd prefer Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis (sleeping sickness), which was mixed in the toothpaste used by the Congolese leader Patrick Lumumba in 1960, and was devised by Stanley Gottlieb, the notoriously known talented chemist and poisons expert who worked for decades for the CIA. Or more recently, we've had the dioxin poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko, the Ukrainian pro-western leader. The list of "political assassinations" since the end of WWII is long enough to make one cower in terror at the idea that we are heading back to the times of the Borgias and the Catherines de Medici. Or could it be that with the "Clash of Civilisations" and the "Wars of Religion" we have already returned to the Dark Ages?
