Trail of poison from key Litvinenko witness lands four in hospital

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1969882,00.html

· Businessman's ex-wife and her children admitted
· Traces of polonium found in car used by Kovtun

Luke Harding in Berlin, Jeevan Vasagar and Tom Parfitt in Moscow
Tuesday December 12, 2006
The Guardian


A key witness to the murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko may have contaminated four other people he came into contact with, German police revealed yesterday.
Russian businessman Dmitry Kovtun, who met Mr Litvinenko on November 1, the day he was fatally poisoned, is being investigated in Germany on suspicion of illegally handling a radioactive substance.

Mr Kovtun's former wife, her two small children and her new partner had been admitted to hospital in Hamburg on a precautionary basis, police said.

German detectives said they were "more certain than ever" that Mr Kovtun had been in contact with polonium-210 before he flew to Britain. The Russian flew from Moscow to Hamburg on October 28, travelling on to London on the morning of November 1. "Kovtun was already contaminated when he arrived in Germany," Thomas Menzel, the head of the special German unit investigating the Litvinenko affair, told a news conference in Hamburg yesterday.
He added: "We are more certain of this than on Sunday." Asked how he could be so sure, he replied: "Kovtun left traces of radiation behind in the car used to pick him up from the airport."

[Lasthorseman]

1. Please, please

are there any more spies we could add to the whitehouse guest list?

[kineneb]

2. this is all so weird

I went surfing over to the Der Spiegel site and read up on their report. Seems that whoever was transporting the polonium did it in a very clumsy manner. The scientists quoted in the article said one could not get contaminated sitting next to a person who had polonium in a paper container in their pants pocket (sorry about sentence construction- almost direct translation from the German).

A simple paper container would shield the carrier from contaminating his environment. What did Kovtun do? Roll around in the stuff?

Reference:

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,453823,00.html

(In German)

[muriel_volestrangler]

3. Perhaps it means he packaged it

and got some on his hands, which he then didn't manage to wash sufficiently (I have no idea of the amount they can detect - I suspect from their claims of "it isn't a hazard in the places it's been found" that it's a very small amount).

[Bobbieo]

4. But what are the long-term effects of this poison???

That is the scary part!!!

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Long term - perhaps not much

First, it has a short radiological half-life - 138 days (it is produced by irradiating another element, and can't be stored for the long term), so the damage it does decreases. The body also gradually eliminates it - the biological half life is about 30 days. So the damage is highest immediately after the dose. It might damage DNA, leading to a cancer, though - which might not become apparent for some time.