Louis Flannery examines the legal implications of the Litvinenko Report
After more than nine years since he fell asleep forever in a London hospital, overcome by a fatal dose of a highly toxic radioactive isotope, Alexander Litvinenko may perhaps rest in peace, in the knowledge that his deathbed statement, in which he directly accused Vladimir Putin of having ordered his murder by poisoning, was almost certainly correct.
Of course, we know that Putin, like all self-respecting and self-deluded monarchs, would have done his best to distance himself from the murder he probably personally ordered, with his aides ready to issue threats and rebuttals on his behalf against anyone who might dare suggest otherwise, in order to help conceal his close involvement. And of course, he would have trusted implicitly his beloved FSB (the modern acronym for the KGB) to do the job well enough to hide any traces leading back to them or him. After all, it had been done before, and with poison. But this time, it didn’t quite go to plan.
A bungled murder
Unfortunately for Putin, the job
