Poisoning Of Ex-Agent Sets Off Alarm Bells

[DoYouEverWonder]

January 7, 2007

MOSCOW -- Ninety-seven percent of the legal production of one of the world's rarest industrial products -- the intensely radioactive isotope polonium-210 -- takes place at a closely guarded nuclear reactor near the Volga River 450 miles southeast of Moscow.

In an average year, about three ounces of the substance is made at the Avangard facility, a former nuclear weapons plant, then sold under strict controls to Russian and foreign companies that prize it for its abilities to reduce static electricity.

This fall, a microscopic quantity of polonium-210, from somewhere, found its way into the body of Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian internal security agent living in London. He died an agonizing death in a hospital 22 days later.

Now an international investigation is trying to track that dose back to its source. Detectives from Scotland Yard have said nothing about where the trail of evidence may be leading; Russian officials have been more willing to talk, saying that Avangard is tightly audited and that illicit production of polonium-210 is technically possible at many of the world's reactors.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/06/AR2007010601491.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. And, gee, where is our US/CIA counter-proliferation network when you

need them?

Oh, oops...

Outed. Gone into hiding. Dead.

[Mind_your_head]

2. Self-delete