Dissident ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko is wasting away in a hospital bed, allegedly poisoned (or maybe not) by his former colleagues. As the L.A. Times notes, he's only the latest in a series of assassination attempts Russian intelligence have supposedly tried to pull off, in recent years.
Two Russian intelligence agents were convicted in Qatar in 2004 for the car-bomb slaying of Chechen separatist leader Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev. They were returned to Russia and later freed.
Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko still has a badly scarred face and painful nerve damage from near-fatal dioxin poisoning during a presidential campaign in which he advocated freeing Ukraine from Russia's sphere of influence.
A Saudi-born financier of the Chechen resistance, Omar ibn Khattab, died in 2002 after opening a poisoned letter. Russia's Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB, was blamed in the killing.
And Anna Politkovskaya, whose slaying Litvinenko was reportedly investigating when he fell ill, became sick after drinking what she claimed was poisoned tea while traveling to Beslan during the 2004 siege of a school by Ingush and Chechen militants.
