From Russia with love

The radioactive poison that killed a former KGB spy turned Kremlin critic has been traced to two BA planes and to Moscow. (WP) The spy, Aleksander Litvinenko, succumbed in a London hospital last week.

Litvinenko is just the latest in a string of mysterious poisonings of Russian president Vladimir Putin's enemies.* Suspicion is drifting toward government agents in this case because a fatal dose of the material in question, polonium-210, could probably only be obtained by someone with access to a nuclear reactor.

Besides being cruel, and an assault on democracy and human rights, doesn't this poison tactic seem a little--I dunno--needlessly complex? Like, how hard would it be just to hire some thug to shoot these people or throw them off a train?

*Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko: dioxin, survived. Anna Politkovskaya, journalist critical of Russian brutality in Chechnya: poisoned, survived, later shot and killed.