[Reader-list] Post war Europe and Obituaries

[aasim khan]

And now an Obituary that is LIVE NEWS .Alexander
Valterovich Litvinenko comes alive in the Obits, each
intricate detail of his last breathe is in the papers,
with The TIMES pulling off the ultimate press coup.
They claim they have got the last words of a poisoned
man. Wont be wrong to call it the 'Rose-bud syndrome'.

Actually was thinking : Whats with Post-war Europe and
Obituaries ?

>From The Independent :
------------------------------------------------------


Alexander Litvinenko 
KGB secret agent turned political dissident who lifted
the lid on the Russian security services 
Published: 25 November 2006 
Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko, intelligence agent:
born Voronezh, Soviet Union 30 August 1962; married
(one son); died London 23 November 2006. 

Alexander Litvinenko was a middle-ranking Russian
security service agent who knew he was risking his
life by stepping out of the shadows to go public with
accusations against the master of the Kremlin. For
President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself,
Litvinenko committed the ultimate betrayal.

Litvinenko, who has died in hospital in London after
being poisoned, joined the KGB in 1988. He was a
lieutenant-colonel in its successor organisation, the
FSB, when he broke cover in October 1998 to accuse his
superiors of ordering him to assassinate the
businessman Boris Berezovsky.

The immensely wealthy Russian oligarch, who
successfully claimed political asylum in Britain after
fleeing fraud charges in Russia in 2000, fell out with
Putin after the President turned on the men who had
helped him to power in the twilight years of the
Yeltsin era. Berezovsky has been an implacable
political foe of Putin ever since.

Litvinenko went public in the most dramatic way
possible, by calling a press conference in Moscow
where he sat flanked by fellow agents clad in
balaclavas. One can only imagine the reaction of the
head of the FSB at the time, who happened to be Mr
Putin.

Born in the city of Voronezh in 1962, Litvinenko had
switched to the KGB from the Soviet military, which he
joined after school. After working for KGB
counter-intelligence, he was promoted to the Organised
Crime Control Directorate, the FSB top secret unit
investigating terrorism and organised crime, where he
worked until his spectacular downfall.

In addition to implicating his bosses in the
assassination bid against Berezovsky, he also accused
them of using his unit to carry out contract killings,
extortion and corruption. His allegations prompted the
FSB to charge him with kidnapping businessmen and
extortion. The case collapsed, but he was rearrested.
He was facing a third court case when he fled to
London in 2000, where a grateful Berezovsky rewarded
him with a job in his security detail.

Once in the West, the former spy continued to speak
out, publishing a book - Vyzyvayu Sebya na Dopros
("Called In for Self-Interrogation") - which lifted
the lid on the FSB. He alleged that the security
services had been behind the 1995 killing of the head
of the ORT television station, Vladislav Listev, who
was murdered in one of the most high-profile unsolved
murders of the 1990s. Litvinenko said that he gathered
evidence about the killing and took it to the
prosecutor-general's office. According to Litvinenko,
he was arrested for his pains, while the evidence was
destroyed.

In 2002, Litvinenko co-authored Blowing up Russia:
terror from within, in which he accused the Russian
security services of responsibility in a series of
deadly attacks on apartment buildings in Moscow. The
attacks in September 1999, which killed 300 people,
led to Putin declaring the second war on the
rebellious Russian republic of Chechnya.

The attacks were officially blamed on Chechen
militants, and Litvinenko was certainly not alone in
questioning the official version. The Independent
reported the accusations against the FSB in January
2000. A friend of Litvinenko, Andrei Nekrasov, made a
film, Disbelief (2004), detailing the allegations,
which Putin has described as "delirious nonsense". But
the most prominent person to accuse the Russian
security services of responsibility for the apartment
block attacks was Berezovsky, who financed
Litvinenko's book.

In May 2002, Litvinenko was convicted in absentia of
abuse of office by a Moscow court and sentenced to
three and a half years in jail.

The small band of political dissidents in London was
growing, causing a major irritant in UK-Russia
relations. A former Chechen actor and rebel commander,
Akhmed Zakayev, claimed asylum in Britain in December
2002, as the Russians were demanding his extradition
to answer charges over the Moscow theatre siege
carried out by Chechen rebels. It took a year and a
much publicised extradition case, in which Zakayev had
the support of the actress Vanessa Redgrave, for the
case to be rejected and for Zakayev to obtain
political asylum. The Chechen and the former FSB agent
were neighbours on the same street in north London.

Despite an assassination attempt in 2005, Litvinenko
continued to write inflammatory articles criticising
Putin in the Chechen press. The Chechen connection
also brought Litvinenko into contact three years ago
with Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian
journalist known for her investigative reports which
exposed the Kremlin's role in atrocities being carried
out on the civilian population in Chechnya. She
survived an earlier poisoning attempt before being
gunned down in the lift of her Moscow apartment block
on 7 October - with the finger of blame, once again,
pointing at the Russian security services.

With the West still in shock over her death,
Litvinenko attended a panel discussion on 19 October,
"The killing of Anna Politkovskaya - Russia's dirty
secrets", held in London at the Frontline club, a
journalists' forum. Litvinenko, one of the many
Russians in the audience, stood up towards the end of
the discussion and said:

I don't want to hide anything. Somebody asked who is
guilty of Anna's death. I can directly answer you: it
is Mr Putin, the President of the Russian Federation.

Litvinenko did not say what evidence he had for
levelling such a charge. But he did say:

I am totally confident that only one person in Russia
can kill someone of Politovskaya's standing in Russia,
and that is Putin. A journalist of her level could not
be touched without the sanction of the President
himself. She was a political opponent and this is why
she was killed.

Exactly 13 days later, he was himself the victim of a
mystery poisoning, which he was convinced was the work
of the Russian secret services.

Anne Penketh 




		
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