Letters to the Editor
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Have the police really concluded this?
Had eaten sushi contaminated with toxin only available from nuclear lab.
According to CNN and other sources, he first met some people at a hotel in Mayfair and then later went to the sushi bar in Picadilly.
If he was poisoned at the sushi bar in Picadilly, then how did the radiation get back to the hotel in Mayfair?
There's a problem with causality here, you see. This case looks rather strange and I'm eager to see what the experts come up with once they are finished analyzing all of the available data.
There are so many scary actors on the stage now that is Russian power politics, I wouldn't dare to guess which character was the villain in this act of the play.
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This Is All Very Sad
Will Russia ever escape this sort of brutalism? I understand that not all the evidence is in yet, but really, who else but Russian agents could contaminate a person with such a rare radiological substance?
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I have a feeling that there's a lot more here than the public will ever know
I've been following the case quite closely, and there are so many mismatches that I feel like both Russia and the Brits are neck-deep in some top-secret wranglings and maneuvering...
(1) He allegedly fell ill on November 1, but the media only found out around November 20.
(2) So he was in the hospital for more than 2 weeks, yet the going theory was that he was poisoned with thallium. Then the thallium theory was discredited about 2 days before his death, at which point, there was a theory of radioactivity that his own doctors publicly denied. THEN, he died on thanksgiving, and almost immediately, it comes out that it was Polonium 210 all along. Why did it take so long for them to figure out what had poisoned him (or to figure out what to tell the media)?
(3) Okay, so it's been confirmed that it was polonium 210. But for some reason, his autopsy is being delayed because he may radioactive. Except that polonium releases alpha rays, which don't even penetrate a piece of paper, so some pathologists could strap on some decontamination suits and hop to it. How hard could this be to procure in the UK
My theories
(a) Russia did do it, because it's pretty damn hard for someone to get polonium 210. But the UK is going to do Putin a favor, botch and screw aroudn with the investigation and never figure out what happened. To have a favor that they can call in to Putin.
(b) this whole radioactive polonium 210 business - seems it's very sloppy, leaves lots of traces, contaminates other people. Why would the FSB do something that could would be so easily discovered? Why not thallium, for example, or innumerable other very effective poisons? It's created so much publicity, why would the FSB want that? I'm sure they could have figured out a way to kill him more quickly than for 3 weeks.
(c) Maybe he decided to kill himself to harm Putin. He comes to the UK government, and they agree to the whole plot. Seems completely implausible at first, but suppose he found out he had some horrible terminal cancer -- this way, he could go out in style. Which brings us back to the autopsy point #3 above. A tumor/cancer would be discovered upon autopsy, so perhaps the autoposy is being delayed so that he can be examined only by people in on the plot, so as to better blame it on Russia.
In any case, I don't think we're getting the whole story at all, and who knows if we ever will.
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Correction: CNN was wrong about the sequence, Video Dog is right after all
I corresponded with the LA Times on this because their account of the timeline differed drastically from the one given by CNN and the New York Times.
The LA Times foreign editor then double-checked the timeline directly wih the investigators. The investigators confirmed that the sushi bar was the first place the victim went.
He started in Picadilly for lunch and then went to Mayfair for tea, not the other way around as CNN has claimed.