[WillowTheWhisp]

Originally Posted by LancYorkYankee

The Peoples Republic of China at the moment! Also, I'd add Vietnam to that list also, oh, and Cuba . . . and all the past ones. Just part of my world!

So why would the Chinese Vietnamese or Cubans want to kill a Russian dissident?

If it really was polonium the very scarcity of the stuff makes it a strange choice.

Of course it would have been far easier to shoot, stab, strangle or even clobber him over the head with a blunt instrument (I've played Cluedo you know!) but dong so would merely have left a dead person who happened to be Russian.

Killing him with a mysterious radioactive poison creates political intrigue which then begs the question why would the Russian 'powers that be' do something to draw attention to themselves in this way? BTW there's no longer a KGB either, it's called something else now which I have momentarily forgotten.

It does of course leave us with another possibility that polonium was used intentionally in order to draw attention to his murder and to cause people to assume that it was 'the Russians'. Now who would do a thing like that I wonder? It couldn't possibly be a secret service like MI5/6 could it? On the other hand, supposing the Russians wanted us to think that our chaps would do something like that to discredit them - would they have done it as a sort of double-bluff?

OK, now my head hurts!