Watson: “But why would Russia
want him dead, six years after he fled to the UK? Well, evidence heard at the
public inquiry, and conversations with confidential sources, make it clear, he
developed some very powerful enemies. As far as the Russian state was
concerned, Alexander Litvinenko was an agent who’d gone ‘rogue’. At this press conference in Moscow,
[archive footage from 1998]
...he accused the Russian security forces of corruption, and of murdering their opponents.”
[archive footage from 1998]
...he accused the Russian security forces of corruption, and of murdering their opponents.”
At
this point in the report there is obvious, almost comically fake footage of
Litvinenko’s face used for target practice, apparently by Russian ‘special
forces’; accepted uncritically as authentic by both Watson and Owen (see Part
4.17). Not only was such footage extremely easy to manufacture artificially
(and both Marina Litvinenko and Anatoly, Alexander’s son, should be reassured
that manufactured artificially it most certainly was) – but cursory examination
reveals that filming it authentically would at the very least have put a camera
in jeopardy. One can see the trainee commandos move into position, but there
are no cameras behind them as they take aim. Therefore, in order to get the
footage one sees, of bullets hitting the target, the camera would have to
have been positioned more or less in the line of fire, in front of the marksmen.
He became an ‘enemy of the
state’. He spent almost a year in prison, and on his release his friend Yuri
Felshtinsky asked a former KGB general, if he’d be safe.
Yuri Felshtinsky: “He told me that Litvinenko committed treason, and in his organisation this treason is punishable by death. And there is no way Litvinenko is going to be pardoned. There is no way the crime Litvinenko committed is going to be forgiven, and that if he ever would see Mr Litvinenko himself personally, if he ever meets him in a dark corner, he would kill him with his own hands.”
Yuri Felshtinsky: “He told me that Litvinenko committed treason, and in his organisation this treason is punishable by death. And there is no way Litvinenko is going to be pardoned. There is no way the crime Litvinenko committed is going to be forgiven, and that if he ever would see Mr Litvinenko himself personally, if he ever meets him in a dark corner, he would kill him with his own hands.”
Watson: “He fled with his
family to the UK, and set himself up as a security consultant, operating in the
sometimes murky world of Mayfair companies wanting to invest in Russia.
At
approximately this point in the narrative, Richard Watson’s corresponding BBC
article does contain a mention of the disgraced oligarch Boris Berezovsky:
“He did paid security work for
the millionaire Boris Berezovsky, who was also a fierce critic of Vladimir
Putin.”
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