Dec 13 2006
New Clues Emerge In Litvinenko Incident
Two new clues have emerged in the puzzle that is the Litvinenko incident. There are now some vague reports of another Russian of interest associated with Kovtun and his trip to Hamburg from Moscow in October (before Litvinenko fell ill):
An unnamed Russian businessman who flew from Moscow to Hamburg on October 28 with Mr Kovtun is also being sought. Police believe this flight was used to transport polonium-210 into Europe.
There is also another hotel that has tested positive for Polonium-210, which again bolsters the idea this was some sort of large smuggling ring verses some targeted assassination:
In addition, a Swedish couple that had stayed at the Shaftesbury Hotel near Picadilly were Tuesday tested at the oncology unit at Lund University Hospital in southern Sweden, the Stockholm daily Expressen reported.
The hotel room the couple had stayed in apparently had traces of polonium.
Seems like an awefully large group of people for an assassination someone wanted to look like an accident.
Also today, Dmitry Kovtun speaks out and claims Litvinenko was the one who contaminated him, and that it happened on Oct 16-18. This is possible and plausible since Polonium 210 was found at hotels associated with Lugovoi’s visit to London and meetings with Litvinenko. We also have, someplace back in my posts on this subject, I believe Lugovoi’s statement that Litvinenko told him he had poisoned himself before Nov 1st. While it is hard to put much stock in Lugovoi’s word by itself, I find it worth considering since he seems to be a cooperating witness, possibly under a plea agreement.
Update: Both Lugovoi and Kovtun are pointing to Oct 16-18th as the logical (as we all know) first time for Polonium 210 contamination for Litvinenko:
Andrei Lugovoi, a security agent-turned-businessman who met with Litvinenko at a London hotel on Nov. 1, the day Litvinenko suspected he was poisoned, said in an interview with the Moskovsky Komsomolets tabloid that he and Litvinenko were poisoned on Oct. 16.
“Who told you that the contamination took place on Nov. 1? It took place much earlier, on Oct. 16,” Lugovoi was quoted as saying by the paper. Lugovoi is himself undergoing radiation checks in a Moscow clinic.
Litvinenko, 43, a former Russian agent and a Kremlin critic, died Nov. 23 of poisoning from polonium-210.
Lugovoi supported his claim by saying that he and Litvinenko visited a London-based security firm where traces of polonium were later found only in mid-October, but did not go there on Nov. 1, meaning that the contamination couldn’t have taken place on that day.
While Lugovoi is being a bit disingenuous with this logic due to the massive radiation signatures at the Millenium Hotel Room and bar, he is being more accurate than the reporting coming out of the UK media – which has been obsessed with the assassination theory. It should be noted though, that Litvinenko’s final dosage could have been the result of a number of contacts with Polonium-210 which was not being handled properly. He could have been building up his poison levels over many weeks, and received a final larger dose on Nov 1. But I am only pointing this out to show there are lots of reasonable scenarios based on what is known to date. The media has jumped the gun – like usual.
The “marking” concept bothers me because if you change clothes and take a shower, the marking is gone. It works only if you think you are going to see the path the person took the day they were marked. Otherwise it becomes useless. Also, you wouldn’t use pure polonium if you are “marking” multiple people. You would use a mixture of isotopes with each person being marked with a unique mix so you can tell which marks are left by which people.
CP you should go into the spy business if you aren’t there already!
That report is counter to earlier reports, Lizarde1. I read a report quoting some health minister or something saying they found levels roughly close to someone who had smoked several packs of cigarettes. So the reporting is not only bad, it is conflicting.
Lizarde1, that is how they mark shipments down pipelines, for exmaple. Each shipment is “marked” with a squirt of a mixture of isotopes at the start so it acts almost like a “bar code”. Explosives are marked that way to determine manufacturer and lot number, lots of things are marked with a mixture of different isotopes to encode them with information. Find explosive residue, check the isotopes, you find the manufacturer and lot number, you know who that lot was sold to and when, then you find out who bought it.
But it would be useless to “mark” everything with only one isotope because you would not be able to get any information. If you mark 10 people with polonium and you find a trace later, you know one of the 10 was there but not which one. In other words, using a pure isotope for marking would be useless. The only time you would do that is if you marked a location and wanted to find everyone who visited that location. And even then you have to check them for marking quickly because one trip to the shower/laundry removes the mark. And that becomes useless if you mark several locations. Then you know someone visited one or more locations but not which ones or how many.
CP so how are the Germans going to VERIFY along with the British the story of Kowtun – presumably there is a way – what do you think that way is?
A little side-note about PO being “difficult to detect.” It was difficult to detect in a hospital setting because they are only set up to detect gamma emitters. But when you have a patient with all of the symptoms of radiation poisoning, except that you can’t find the radiation, then your next very very obvious question is “what the heck is it?!?” And when you are trying to identify a radiation source (as opposed to just using medical equipment designed for other purposes to see if you can see gamma rays) then anyone with a basic education in physics or health physics or nuclear safety knows to go to a research lab and use a multi-channel analyzer to look at the signatures. Which is what they did, and the PO was immediately obvious when using the right equipment. This is not an exotic detector — it is typically a board that you buy from canberra for a coupla’ thousand dollars and slot into a doorstop PC. It has lots of usefulness in teaching.
(I live in a place with trace amounts alpha emitters in the water — 2-10 picocuries/liter. We use a pur water filter with a replaceable cartridge on the sink — a cartridge lasts about 2.5 years. For a senior project, one of my husband’s students measured the filter cartridge in the multi-channel analyzer, and, while it was very small peaks above background, you could clearly see the uranium and the daughter products, including the polonium. In other words, this is not some exotic measurement with an exotic piece of equipment — it’s a college-student level project.)
AJ’s cite at monstersandcritics.com states that six Swedes visited the Pine Bar at the Millennium in late October – early November. It’s much more logical that the Swedish couple who stayed in a room at Shaftesbury Hotel near Picadilly which was found to be contaminated were among the six who visited the Pine Bar, became peripherally contaminated there, then tracked it back to their hotel and contaminated their room. At least that seems the most straightforward and likely explanation to me.
“I expect the British to accuse Kovtun and Lugovoi of the murder of Litvinenko, and the Russians to refuse extradition and point to a terrorist smuggling ring within the circle of the London exiles. Many will swallow the smuggling story given Litvinenko’s and Berezovsky’s histories and associates, but no-one organising a terrorist attack with the Chechens is going to announce to the world that the Chechens have an atomic bomb missing a vital ingredient and make a deal of informing the authorities about the fact (as Berezovsky did in 2005). It’s probably an assassination in the guise of a smuggling operation, organised by Putin rivals within the government and security apparatus.”
Bravo, Rosenkreutz! I agree with everything except your last bit about “organized by,” which I’m still undecided on. I think it was organized by Russians connected to the Kremlin and using governmental sources, but can’t see why they could not be friends of Putin. Of course none of this will ever track all the way back to its source until well after the fact, and so we can argue points for another forty years…
Actually EIGHT Swedes were involved – 6 at Millenium and 2 at the hotel
“I have not vanished at all, I’m still at my house and I never spoke to a journalist from the Times,†Russian Yevgeny Limarev told AFP by telephone.
Left by Lizarde1 on December 13th, 2006
Good catch, Lizarde. At least he’s accounted for now.
Germans (police spokesman) not certain that the interview with Kovtun yesterday was really with Kovtun:
Zudem seien sich die Ermittler nicht sicher, ob Spiegel-TV in seinem Telefoninterview am Dienstag wirklich mit Kowtun gesprochen habe.
http://www.pr-inside.com/de/zeugen-gesucht-r31715.htm
per the same German article Police are looking for witnesses to see if Kovtov, Lugovoi and Sokolenko went to Germany after Nov. 1
Limarev told the Ekho Moskvy radio station that the documents, which Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant, handed to Litvinenko during their meeting November 1, the presumed date of his poisoning, contained no information which could have led to the elimination of the Russian defector.
He said the documents concerned Scaramella himself and the head of the Mitrokhin Commission, a parliamentary body set up by former Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi to investigate the activities of Soviet and post-Soviet spies in Italy.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20061213/56890615.html
“CP so how are the Germans going to VERIFY along with the British the story of Kowtun ”
Absolutely no clue but it appears that he told them something that could be verified.
I am glad the Germans are on the case. I believe they will approach it with a different mindset. I believe they will go in with no assumptions, gather evidence and let that evidence speak for itself.
The amount of contamination and the degree to which that contamination has spread would on the surface of it tend to point toward either an amateur assassin unaware or not caring if they hurt themselves in the process or traffic in the material. The duration of time and variety of contaminated locations would also point away from a targeted assassination and be consistent with coming into direct contact with the material many different times. That is also more likely a scenario with traffic in the stuff and less likely with an assassin (but doesn’t rule it out, just makes one scenario more likely than the other).
That Litvinenko fell ill on November, 1 doesn’t mean that was his only exposure to the stuff given the earlier contamination of his cohorts. I would be looking for places Litvinenko visited on days he met with those people in the past but hasn’t visited since.
What I also find interesting are the different hotels being used on these trips. Most people who frequently fly to a place tend to use a place where they are comfortable. They get to know the staff and that tends to bring some benefits if a favor is needed, for example. These guys seemed to use a different hotel each time. That points to someone who is trying to vary their routine and not be predictable. This makes the notion of putting someone on the staff of the Millennium Hotel less likely because they were apparently varying their routine and one wouldn’t know which hotel they were going to use.
Litvinenko, on the other hand, wasn’t varying his routine. He often ate at the sushi bar. That is the one place where you *would* want to place someone if you were going to poison him because you would know he would be in there at some point on most weeks.
How does the new hotel that was found to be contaminated fit into this?
I would be interested to know if Lugovoi ever stayed at the Shaftesbury Hotel within the past, say, two or three months.
Loose ends:
i am not sure we know that Kovtun stayed at the Millenium – and I am not sure we know that Sokolenko stayed at the Millenium. On the other hand, there is also the person that the British are alleged to be holding and there is also the person who flew with Kovton to Hamburg.
Lugovoy was very security conscious – hence varying the routine would be normal for him. Litvinenko was IMO not the brightest bulb in the socket
Lizarde, thanks for setting me straight there — eight Swiss tourists. I still think it’s still most likely that they all were peripherally contaminated, and one couple tracked it back into their room themselves. The British tourism industry probably won’t like that theory, though.
Also re. the latest article you posted: I wish I could read German! But all the various phone interviews with the press from the clinic with Kovtun and Lugovoi have bothered me. How do they know they’re even speaking with Kovtun or Lugovoi?
The implication regarding the hotel in Shaftsbury was that it was being examined with respect to the Oct. 16 time frame – same as Parkes Hotel and that other office building 1 Cavendish square -I think it was talked about in news reports around Dec. 5 same as the other 2 places but I could be wrong
I find this wording interesting:
” Radiation testing at the Best Western Hotel on London’s Shaftesbury Avenue found no reason for health concerns”
That was from back on December 6. It doesn’t say polonium wasn’t found. It says “no reason for health concerns”. So it appears we have had a lot of hotels being tested.
You can send Limarev an e-mail at his blog:
December 05
Contact info
http://limarev.spaces.live.com/
For mass media and editors’ inquiries about dossiers of Alexander Litvinenko / Mario Scaramella and my future book: limarev_evgueni@hotmail.com