On 23 November 2006 the former Russian intelligence officer Aleksandr Litvinenko died of polonium poisoning in London. As The Moscow Times reports, on 1 November 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned by the radioactive agent polonium-210 while drinking tea with one of his business partners, Andrei Lugovoi. Over the next few years UK police gathered evidence substantiating the charge that Andrei Lugovoi poisoned Litvinenko. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia was involved in the murder and ordered the country to pay $137,000 to Marina Litvinenko, Aleksandr Litvinenko’s widow. The Kremlin denied its involvement. Andrei Lugovoi was elected to the Russian parliament in 2007 and received a Special Services to the Fatherland award from Vladimir Putin in 2015.
Sources:
The Moscow Times: Former Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko died in London on Nov. 23, 2006 after being poisoned by a rare radioactive compound, polonium-210. British and European investigators blamed the Kremlin for Litvinenko’s death, sparking a diplomatic conflict between Russia and the U.K. that has continued to escalate to this day.
RFE/RL: On November 23, 2006, former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer and fierce Kremlin critic Aleksandr Litvinenko died in a London hospital of radiation poisoning, more than three weeks after he fell suddenly and violently ill. Litvinenko’s death sent the life of his widow, Marina Litvinenko, in a completely new direction: For 15 years, she has dedicated herself to the fight to establish justice in her husband’s case. “I found myself between two walls,” she told Current Time in an interview in London earlier this month. “One was Russia, which didn’t want to investigate. And the other was Britain, which had no interest in that either.” Many in the British establishment were reluctant to rock the boat with Russia, particularly in view of the massive sums of money that Russians were pouring into London. Yet she has never considered giving up.
Wikipedia: Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko (30 August 1962 or 4 December 1962 – 23 November 2006) was a British-naturalised Russian defector and former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) who specialised in tackling organized crime.
Hudoc: CARTER v. RUSSIA. Art 2 (substantive) • Life • Poisoning and assassination of a Russian defector and dissident in the United Kingdom by two persons acting as agents of Russia • Administration of poison amounting to the exercise of physical power and control over the man’s life in a situation of proximate targeting. Art 2 (procedural) • Domestic authorities’ failure to conduct an effective investigation into the death. Art 38 • State’s failure to comply with its procedural obligation on account of unjustified refusal to submit the material requested by the Court
