On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, an former officer with Russia’s FSB intelligence agency now living in London, collapsed after drinking tea with an ex-colleague, Andrei Lugovoi.
Litvinenko died three weeks later from what doctors eventually diagnosed as poisoning. He had drunk tea spiked with a lethal dose of Polonium-210, a highly radioactive isotope.
Today, an inquiry into the death found that Lugovoi and an accomplice, Dmitri Kovtun, assassinated the father-of-three on the orders of the FSB – the successor to the feared KGB.
The inquiry’s chairman Sir Robert Owen said the operation was probably personally approved by the agency’s chief at the time and by Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.
Litvinenko is not the only outspoken critic of the Kremlin to be murdered or to perish in suspicious circumstances.
In Russia, journalists, opposition politicians and others who criticise the country’s leaders have a tendency to die young. Here are some of the most notorious cases.
Boris Nemtsov
The 55-year-old opposition politican was shot four times in the back as he walked across a bridge near the Kremlin in February last year.
Nemtsov, who was once seen as a successor to former president Boris Yeltsin, was an outspoken critic of Mr Putin who was investigating Russia’s clandestine activities in Ukraine at the time of his death.
A report alleging that more than 200 Russian soldiers had been killed while fighting alongside pro-Russian separatists was released posthumously.
Theories about who really ordered the killing abound.
Nemtsov told an interviewer before his death: “I fear Putin will kill me.” But the alleged involvement of people from Russia’s troublesome Chechnya region has complicated the story.
Five men from the Northern Caucasus have been arrested over Nemtsov’s murder. One suspect, Zaur Dadaev, confessed to the crime but later retracted his confession, saying he had been tortured.
It emerged that Dadaev had fought in a Chechen militia group under Ramzan Kadyrov, now the pro-Moscow president of the Chechen Republic.
Kadyrov, a key Putin ally, has defended the murder suspect in online posts, calling him “a genuine Russian patriot”.
Today the head of Russia’s Investigative Committee was quoted as saying that the case had been solved, without naming the alleged culprits.
The Kremlin has denied any involvement and Mr Putin has publicly condemned Nemtsov’s murder.
Journalism – a dangerous profession
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says 56 people who work in the media have been killed in Russia since 1992. Of those, 36 were murdered, and in 32 cases the killers have gone unpunished.
Russia is ranked in the top 10 in both the organisation’s lists of the most dangerous countries for journalists, and those where murderers routinely go free.
The Russian Federation slipped four places last year to number 152 of 180 countries ranked for press freedom by Reporters Without Borders.
The first high-profile case of a reporter being killed because of his work was the death of Dmitry Kholodov, who reported on the alleged ethnic cleansing of Georgians by Russian-backed separatists in Abkhazia.
On 17 October 1994 Kholodev picked up a briefcase from the left-luggage area at a train station. The case was supposed to contain documents exposing corruption in the Russian military, but it had been packed with explosives.
Kholodev’s murder is the only occasion when a bomb has been used to assassinate a Russian journalist. Many others have been beaten to death or shot by gunmen after investigating official corruption, state wrongdoing or organised crime.
The 2006 murder of the award-winning reporter Anna Politkovskaya brought international attention to the plight of journalists in Russia.
Politkovskaya was gunned down in the lift in her Moscow apartment block. Five men have been convicted of carrying out the killing, but the mastermind who ordered it has never been brought to justice.
The 48-year-old was a well-known opponent of President Putin, and had also made an enemy of Ramzan Kadyrov. She claimed the Chechen leader threatened her in a hostile interview, and she later compared him to Joseph Stalin.
Journalists who report on regional politics have died too.
Magomed Yevloyev, who ran a website critical of the Moscow-backed government of Ingushetia, was shot in the head while in police custody in 2008. Officers claimed he was resisting arrest and had tried to grab hold of one of their guns.
Others who have died while in custody include Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and accountant investigating government corruption.
Magnitsky was arrested and held without trial for almost a year. Days before he was due to be released, he was allegedly beaten to death in Moscow’s Butyrka prison.
There was an international outcry, with the US government passing legislation barring a number of people they suspected of involvement from entering the country.
Mr Putin has said that investigations showed there was no malicious intent or criminal negligence in Magnitsky’s death, adding: “It was just a tragedy.”
The Litvinenko connection
Mr Putin had been Litvinenko’s boss at the FSB. He sacked him in 1998 for giving a press conference with other FSB men alleging links between the Russian mafia and the top echelons of the country’s law enforcement agencies.
Fearing for his safety, Litvinenko fled to London, where he worked for MI6. He went on to make a series of spectacular allegations about corruption and wrongdoing by various Russian state institutions.
One claim was that the Kremlin used FSB agents posing as Chechen militants to stage the 2002 Moscow theatre crisis that led to the deaths of about 130 hostages.
Anna Politkovskaya was one journalist who aired the possibility that the theatre siege had been one of a number of “false flag” attack carried out by Kremlin provocateurs to rally public support for a second war in Chechnya.
According to a book written by Litvinenko’s widow Marina and former Soviet dissident Alex Goldfarb, Litvinenko passed a file on FSB involvement to Politkovskaya via an intermediary, the liberal Russian politician Sergei Yushenkov. All three were later assassinated.
Yushenkov died in a hail of bullets near his home in Moscow in April 2003. Politkovskaya was shot three years later on President Putin’s birthday, 7 October.
Before his own death, Litvinenko alleged that both had been killed on the orders of the Kremlin. He also accused Mr Putin personally of his own murder in a deathbed statement written, the former agent said, amid “the beating of wings of the angel of death”.
The statement ended: “May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.”
Mr Putin has denied state involvement in the murder of Politkovskaya, saying her death was more damaging to the authorities than her journalism. And the Kremlin has dismissed claims of its involvement in the death of Litvinenko as “sheer nonsense”.
In March last year President Putin gave a medal for “services to the fatherland” to Andrei Lugovoi.
Boris Berezovsky
Litvinenko had been an associate of Berezovsky when the tycoon was one of the most powerful men in Russia. When Litvinenko fled to London his escape was organised by Alex Goldfarb, who worked for Berezovsky.
Berezovsky was found dead at his home in Berkshire in March 2013. Police said his death was consistent with hanging, but a coroner later recorded an open verdict.
His death came after he lost a court case against Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and was ordered to pay an estimated £100m in legal fees.
The 67-year-old – a doctor of mathematics who made a fortune from the privatisation of Russia under President Boris Yeltsin – had himself been named as a suspect in the murder of American journalist Paul Klebnikov, who had written unflattering articles about Berezovsky.
Mr Putin has said that Berezovsky wrote to him twice before his death asking for forgiveness for his “mistakes” and to be allowed to return to his homeland. The Russian president said he could not rule out the involvement of foreign intelligence agencies in the oligarch’s death.
In a sign of how tangled the web has become, Alexander Litvinenko’s father has been quoted by Russian media as saying he believes Berezovsky, not the Russian government, to be the real culprit in his son’s murder.
