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Police fear that the murder of a former Kremlin spy may have been part of a double killing plot after a second man was taken to hospital last night with radiation poisoning. The Anti-Terror Group is examining whether the killers of Alexander Litvinenko also tried to poison Mario Scaramella, an Italian security expert who met the Russian exile on the day that he fell ill. Toxicologists confirmed yesterday that Mr Scaramella had also been contaminated by a “significant” amount of deadly polonium-210. The level leads them to suspect that it was more than he could have ingested from simple physical...

...Litvinenko "was giving Scaramella lots of information about Russian and criminal infiltrations in Italy, but most of it was very difficult to verify and crosscheck. It was a little bit out on a limb." In the old days, Litvinenko had been familiar with criminal clans in Russia, now he was making risky approaches to the Italian mafia. Scaramella believed if they could get inside this network, they would be able to leverage much more damaging intelligence about Italian politicians. They spread their net wider. The Litvinenko dossier lists a dizzying roll call of names investigated by the pair, among them...

The Polonium Diversion At least a dozen people have been contaminated by the rare radioactive isotope Polonium 210. The list includes Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB who died from a dose of Polonium 210 in London on November 23rd; Andrei Lugovoi, a former colleague of Litvinenko in the KGB, who met with Litvinenko at the Pine bar of the Millennium Hotel in London the day he became ill, November 1st; Dmitry Lugovoi, Lugovoi’s business associate, who also attended that November 1st meetings; 7 employees of the Millennium Hotel; Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant, who dined with...

24/12/2006 - 2:18:23 PM Italian who met spy Litvinenko arrested  :: latest Police today arrested an Italian security expert who met former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko the day he fell ill from poisoning. Mario Scaramella was arrested in Naples, where he landed on his way back from London, Italian news agencies reported. Rome prosecutors have been investigating Scaramella for violating secrets of his office and possible arms trafficking. Scaramella met Litvinenko at a London sushi bar on November 1, the day the former spy fell ill. On his deathbed on November 23, Litvinenko - a former KGB agent and harsh...

THE Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has expressed his anger at Britain’s failure to gag Alexander Litvinenko in the final hours of his life, the cabinet has been told.Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, told ministers that the Russian government had “taken exception” to the poisoned former spy’s deathbed letter accusing the Putin regime of murdering him. This weekend a potential suspect — Andrei Lugovoi — admitted he had been contaminated with the radioactive poison polonium-210 but insisted: “I’ve been framed.” Beckett, who spoke to her Russian counterpart before Thursday’s cabinet meeting, said the Russians had “seemingly failed to understand” that Litvinenko...

Test results on Mario Scaramella, the man feared to be the second victim of a Russian hit squad widely blamed for the death of spy Alexander Litvinenko, shows no sign of radiation poisoning. The Italian academic who met the ex-KGB man on the day he was allegedly poisoned, was admitted to hospital on Friday having tested positive for a "significant" quantity of the radioactive substance. Health chiefs confirmed on Friday night that Mr Scaramella had traces of deadly polonium 210, which is believed to have killed Mr Litvinenko, in his body. But doctors at London's University College Hospital have said...

An Italian contact of Russian ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko, killed by radioactive poisoning in London, claimed that the Kremlin ordered his death because he knew too much, an Italian newspaper reported Saturday. "Litvinenko didn't die from stomach pain," Mario Scaramella, one of the last to see him alive, said in an interview with the daily Corriere della Sera. A professor at the University of Naples, Scaramella had been a consultant for an Italian parliamentary inquiry into agents recruited in Italy by the former Soviet KGB secret service. Litvinenko collaborated with the Italian inquiry commission. When asked by the newspaper if he...

"Global Trends 2015" Terrorism-Related Excerpts -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The following items are terrorism-related items from the National Intelligence Council's "Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts" report (December 2000). Transnational Terrorism (page 50) States with poor governance; ethnic, cultural, or religious tensions; weak economies; and porous borders will be prime breeding grounds for terrorism. In such states, domestic groups will challenge the entrenched government, and transnational networks seeking safehavens. At the same time, the trend away from state-supported political terrorism and toward more diverse, free-wheeling, transnational networks—enabled by information technology—will continue. Some of the states that actively sponsor...

On New Year’s Day in 1988, Abdullah Ali, an Iraqi businessman who had been living in London for eight years, joined three compatriots for dinner at a restaurant called Cleopatra in Notting Hill.The next morning, he was taken ill with flu-like symptoms and was admitted to hospital. There his condition rapidly deteriorated — his hair fell out, he developed excruciating skin and joint pain, and paralysis and respiratory failure began to set in. Fifteen days later he was dead — but not before he had begun to wonder whether something had been added to his vodka. He was right: the...

Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned on the direct orders of the Kremlin because of his biting mockery of President Putin, according to a former Soviet spy now living in Britain. Oleg Gordievsky, the most senior KGB agent to defect to Britain, said that the attempt to kill Mr Litvinenko had been state-sponsored. It was carried out by a Russian friend and former colleague who had been recruited secretly in prison by the FSB, the successor to the KGB. The Italian who allegedly put poison in Mr Litvinenko’s sushi “had nothing to do with it”. “Of course it is state-sponsored. He...

Russia's Poisonous Foreign Policy // The West thinks Alexander Litvinenko is a victim of the Kremlin The scandal surrounding the poisoning of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko has reached international proportions. A photograph of Litvinenko in his hospital bed emblazoned the front pages of the leading European and world newspaper yesterday with editorial coverage that favored the idea that the political emigrant is suffering for his criticism of the Kremlin. The case has been taken up by the antiterrorism unit of Scotland Yard and Washington is not standing up quietly either. The U.S. administration has asked Great Britain for all...

IMAGINE you were a foreign power that wanted to get rid of a dissident who had set up home in London. Would you (a) push the troublemaker under a bus, (b) have him mown down by a hit-run driver, or (c) arrange for him to be poisoned while eating in a crowded restaurant? If you wanted to make the death look natural, or just to keep things simple, you would presumably avoid the restaurant scenario. And yet, if many Russia-watchers are to be believed, the country's Federal Security Service (FSB) has carried out just such an assassination. On November 1,...

The last person to meet Alexander Litvinenko before he succumbed to the agonising effects of radioactive poisoning is a self-professed expert in nuclear materials. International 'security consultant' Mario Scaramella, who joined Litvinenko for the now infamous clandestine meeting in a London sushi bar, headed an organisation which tracked dumped nuclear waste, including Soviet nuclear missiles left over from the Cold War.