16 February 2017
Poisonous Headlines
“We have a lot of killers.”
by Neil Tidmarsh
Welcome to the Shaw Sheet crime club. I lay before you three cases from this week’s global headlines. Three prime cases of apparent political assassination, not from the Renaissance Italy of Assassin’s Creed and Machiavelli, but from the here and now, from the twenty-first century world which you and I inhabit:
Case One. A 45 year old man is taken ill at Kuala Lumpur international airport, Malaysia. He reports a headache and faintness, and is taken to the airport’s clinic. There he has a seizure, and is rushed to Putrajaya hospital, but he is pronounced dead on arrival. Before his seizure, however, he managed to tell airport staff that he had been attacked and poisoned as he was waiting to board a flight to Macao, where his family lives; his attackers were two women – one grabbed him from behind and the other sprayed or splashed a liquid into his face. He also claimed to be Kim Jong-nam, the older half-brother of Kim Jong-un, Supreme Leader of North Korea.
That wasn’t the name on his passport, which was found to be false. But local police confirmed his identity; he was indeed Kim Jong-un’s half-brother, the illegitimate son of North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il and a North Korean film star. He’d been educated in the West and lived most of his life in China, was noted for his playboy lifestyle, but was often critical of his half-brother’s regime. He’d survived at least one other assassination attempt before, a hit and run attack by North Korean spies in China six years ago.
Now police in Malaysia suspect that the two women who attacked him at the airport were also North Korean spies, armed with a nerve agent which they sprayed at him in a weapon disguised as a fountain pen. They apparently fled from the airport in a taxi after the attack. North Korea has claimed the body, but Malaysia is determined to undertake a post-mortem examination first, in order to identify the toxin.
Kim Jong-un is fond of baroque methods of execution, and of executing his relatives, if the rumours from his closed country are to be believed. It’s alleged that his uncle Chang Sung-thaek was accused of treason, stripped naked, and killed by a pack of dogs three years ago. His unfortunate defence minister, Hyon Yong Chol, was reportedly blasted to pieces with an anti-aircraft gun last year for falling asleep in his presence.
Case Two. Someone else is taken ill while waiting for a flight, this time in Russia. The politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, a member of the Russian opposition, was due to fly to the United States, where his wife and children live, but after experiencing sweating, nausea, difficulty in breathing and an abnormally high heart-beat he found himself in a Moscow hospital with acute organ failure instead. He remains in a critical condition, in a medically induced coma, on a life-support system. He suffered a similar mysterious illness two years ago when he almost died, believed by many to have been an assassination attempt by poisoning. The Russian investigative committee refused to look into it, but a French laboratory found high levels of heavy metal in his blood, though they were unable to identify a toxin. His wife is certain that this most recent attack is another case of poisoning, and has sent samples of his blood and hair to a private clinic in Israel for testing. She has declared that her husband is suffering from “acute poisoning by an undetermined substance.” She is in no doubt who is to blame. “Putin and his government have created a climate in the country where such actions are condoned and even encouraged” she told The Times.
Mr Kara-Murza is a leader of the pro-democracy Open Russia movement. He was an ally of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition activist and critic of the government, before Mr Nemtsov was shot dead under mysterious circumstances near Red Square in 2015 (in fact Mr Kara-Murza had just been touring Russia showing a film about Mr Nemtsov’s life). Five Chechens have been charged with Mr Nemtsoz’s murder, but many people believe that it will never be known who ordered his assassination. Nevertheless, Mr Putin has been accused of ordering such murders; last year a British judge declared that the Russian president probably approved the poisoning of the former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London ten years ago. The Kremlin denied the verdict.
Case Three. Oleg Anashschenko, a pro-Russian rebel military leader in eastern Ukraine, is killed by a car bomb. Four days later Mikhail Tolstykh, another notorious commander of pro-Russian rebel forces, is killed in an explosion. Is this surprising? After all, there is a war going on. Well, as it happens, both men were killed far from the front, in the heart of their own territory. Tolstykh died while sitting in his own office – which was hit by a rocket fired from a portable missile-launcher – in the capital of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic. Some have blamed the Ukrainian government in Kiev, others have blamed rival separatist factions. But the biggest suspicion is that they were killed for disobeying orders, for continuing and indeed intensifying the armed conflict in defiance of the Russian-sponsored peace agreement signed in December. A similar purge of maverick rebel leaders occurred two years ago, soon after the signing of the Minsk accord, an agreement which Putin more or less dictated (see ‘Ukraine’s Fragile Ceasefire’, Shaw Sheet issue 5, 04 June 2015). A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, denied any Russian involvement in the two recent deaths.
Last week, a presenter on Fox News confronted Donald Trump with allegations that President Putin was a ‘killer’ and has been involved in the murder of critics and opponents. “Well, do you think our country is so innocent?” was the response of the president of the USA. “There are a lot of killers” Trump said. “We have a lot of killers.” That may or may not be true (though I’m pretty sure that the Bourne movies are just movies and not news, fake or otherwise). The Florida senator Marco Rubio tweeted “When has a Democratic political activist been poisoned by the GOP, or vice versa?” (thus scoring the kind of bulls-eye he never quite managed when he was competing against Trump for the Republican leadership), and other senators have angrily denied any equivalency. But there’s something else. “We have a lot of killers.” That sounds like a boast, doesn’t it? It’s almost as if he’s jealous of the Russian guy’s reputation and is trying to big-up his own side.
Nevertheless, if it is true, should we congratulate the US secret services for managing to keep such work out of the headlines?
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