Scotland Yard Accuses Russia of Using Nuclear Weapon in London

Nico Hines
The Daily Beast

The British government traced radioactive poison used to kill an ex-KGB spy from a hotel tea kettle all the way back to Moscow.

LONDON­ — Scotland Yard has formally accused Russia of carrying out a nuclear attack on the streets of London for the first time.

Years of painstaking investigation and forensic work have convinced British law enforcement agents and the security services that the Kremlin was behind a dastardly plot to assassinate a Russian defector with a cup of tea laced with the radioactive isotope Polonium-210.

“Our silence must now end,” said the lawyer representing Scotland Yard, on the penultimate day of the inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

Litvinenko, a former KGB and FSB agent, died slowly, and in great pain, in November 2006. Several weeks earlier he had taken tea with a former Russian intelligence operative at a luxury hotel less than a mile from Buckingham Palace.

(More here.)