HERE’S A STORY QUOTING YUSHCHENKO’S CHIEF OF STAFF SAYING THAT ELEMENTS OF THE KGB MAY HAVE BEEN INVOLVED IN THE DIOXIN POISONING.
I would assume that the KGB (a) has access to all kinds of poisons that are far less detectable than dioxin and (b) knows how to actually use such poisons so as to guarantee the death of the victim.
Dioxin appears to be highly detectable (as indicated by the fact they were able to confirm it by testing a living, metabolizing subject long after the poisoning occurred). It also normally builds up over time before it becomes fatal. Nobody has really known till now, it seems, what it does in high, sudden doses. Thus it would be an unreliable way of killing someone and one that would make the fact that a poisoning occurred abundantly clear (leading to an investigation and public outrage).
This sounds more to me like it was the work of amateurs–local Ukranian politicos who had access to dioxin and decided to use it on Yushchenko without really having expertise in a wide range of poisons or how to use them.
Then again, maybe they would use something you wouldn’t expect, so as to make you think it wasn’t them </tinfoil>
Seriously, though…just ask this question: Qui bono?
But you’re assuming:
1. That they wanted to kill him. Perhaps they just wanted to disfigure him; after all, he was known for his movie-star good looks.
2. That because the poison was detectable, it’s use was bumbling, and therefore likely the act of Ukrainian secret police, rather than the poison-efficient KGB.
Remember how we all thought the Soviet Army was well-nigh invincible? Then we saw how they got their hinnies kicked in their Chechnen incursions by a bunch of amateurs. The myth of the invincible Soviet army was shown to be hollow.
I suspect the same is probably true of the KGB. They’re not nearly as good as their reputation . . . .
B Knotts, the Russian government would certainly benefit, but then so would Yushchenko’s Ukrainian opponents.
Cornelius: In regard to (1), good point, though if they were only to disfigure him and do so in a testable way then they would run the risk of creating a sympathy vote for him and increasing his chances of winning.
In regard to (2), I’m quite sure that the KGB has a lot of competence and efficiency problems, like the rest of Russia. But I suspect that they’re rather good at one particular thing: making individual people dead.
I suspect they invested a lot of time and energy in figuring out how to do this and do so in a reliable and hard-to-detect way. Certainly I expect them to have more poisons in their arsenal than one as ill-suited to killing somebody as dioxin apparently is.
Yushchenko poisoned, likely to become folk hero
When the Ukraine’s pro-West presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned by his opponents, Yushchenko was transformed in more ways than one. Everyone has seen the photos showing the obvious transformation — the dioxin has disfigured Yushche…
I read speculation somewhere that the use of dioxin might have been to try and “terrorize”, not murder.
I don’t believe for second that the guy did it to himself for sympathy. Though I’d say that the ever-more-loony Pat Buchanan thinks so:
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=4114