FactCheck: how many more Kremlin critics have died suspiciously?

FactCheck: how many more Kremlin critics have died suspiciously?

*On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, an former officer with Russia’s FSB intelligence agency now living in London, collapsed after drinking tea with an ex-colleague, Andrei Lugovoi.-----*Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lift in her Moscow apartment block. Five men have been convicted of carrying out the killing, but the mastermind who ordered it has never been brought to justice.

The 55-year-old opposition politican was shot four times in the back as he walked across a bridge near the Kremlin in February last year.

By Patrick Worrall-January 21, 2016

On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, an former officer with Russia’s FSB intelligence agency now living in London, collapsed after drinking tea with an ex-colleague, Andrei Lugovoi.

Litvinenko died three weeks later from what doctors eventually diagnosed as poisoning. He had drunk tea spiked with a lethal dose of Polonium-210, a highly radioactive isotope.

Today, an inquiry into the death found that Lugovoi and an accomplice, Dmitri Kovtun, assassinated the father-of-three on the orders of the FSB – the successor to the feared KGB.

The inquiry’s chairman Sir Robert Owen said the operation was probably personally approved by the agency’s chief at the time and by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

Litvinenko is not the only outspoken critic of the Kremlin to be murdered or to perish in suspicious circumstances.

In Russia, journalists, opposition politicians and others who criticise the country’s leaders have a tendency to die young. Here are some of the most notorious cases.

Boris Nemtsov

The 55-year-old opposition politican was shot four times in the back as he walked across a bridge near the Kremlin in February last year.

Full Story>>>