Toxic tales: Political poisonings

In 1978, Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was waiting for a bus home after a shift at the BBC World Service. He felt a sharp jab in his thigh and turned to see a man picking up an umbrella. Three days later, Markov was dead, killed by what many believe to have been a poisoned dart filled with ricin and fired from the brolly. Alexander Litvinenko On November 1, 2006, former Russian secret agent Alexander Litvinenko met two Russian contacts for tea at a top London hotel. The 43-yearold fell ill immediately afterwards and was found to have drunk tea laced with Polonium-210 — a rare and expensive radioactive isotope produced in Russia. He died after three agonising weeks.

Viktor Yushchenko

Viktor Yushchenko would go on to be president of Ukraine but in September 2004, he was engaged in a bruising election campaign battle against proMoscow candidate Viktor Yanukovich when he fell seriously ill. Months of tests in an Austrian clinic determined that he had ingested a massive amount of dioxin. Although he survived, Yushchenko’s face was left bloated and pockmarked, and he had to undergo regular treatment in Switzerland.

Khaled Meshaal

Posing as Canadian tourists, agents from Israeli secret service Mossad targeted Khaled Meshaal, then head of the Hamas political bureau, by injecting a mysterious poison into his ear on a street in Jordan’s capital Amman. As Meshaal slipped into a coma, Jordanian police captured two of the attackers.