Reports that KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko converted to Islam before
his mysterious poisoning with radioactive polonium 210 is raising suspicions
that he may have been involved in a plot to smuggle the deadly substance to
terrorist groups willing to pay millions even for a gram, Joseph Farah's G2
Bulletin is reporting on Sunday.
Scotland Yard detectives are now trying to discover if Litvinenko had
any secret links with Islamic extremist terror groups, the London Sunday
Express is reporting.
Their biggest fear, the paper reports, is that Litvinenko, who died of
polonium-210 poisoning in a London
hospital, may have been helping al-Qaida or other extremist groups get hold of
radioactive material to be used in a devastating "dirty" atom bomb.
Britain's
secret intelligence service MI6 had earlier learned that al-Qaida was prepared
to pay $ 3 million a gram for polonium 210, G2 Bulletin reported last week.
Litvinenko's friend Mario Scaramella now says the late spy helped
smuggle radioactive material from Russia
to Switzerland
in 2000. Litvinenko was also known to have sympathies with Chechen rebels,
seeking to break away from Moscow
and create an independent Muslim state.
Litvinenko's conversion to Islam was announced by his next-door
neighbor, moderate Muslim and Chechen dissident Akhmed Zakayev, who revealed:
"He was read to from the Koran the day before he died and told his wife
that he wanted to be buried in accordance with Muslim tradition."
Litvinenko's body is still so "radiologically hot" that an
autopsy cannot yet be conducted. It is stored in a lead-lined vault in a London morgue.
Polonium 210 has been identified in five separate locations around London.
One is the luxury Millennium Hotel, near the U.S. Embassy. Another is a
building in Mayfair that houses the office of
Boris Berezovsky, a close friend of Litvinenko, and now an avowed enemy of
Russian President Vladimir Putin.
While the government has insisted there is no cause for panic, MI6 and
Britain's internal security service, MI5, have jointly launched a top-priority
hunt on how further quantities of Polonium 210 could be smuggled by al-Qaida.
The hunt began a week ago in Peshawar.
The ancient Pakistan city
hosts a joint MI6/CIA surveillance operation supported by America's
National Security Agency satellite surveillance.
Using the latest cyber-technology, the intelligence officers in Peshawar picked up a short-burst transmission from
somewhere in Peshawar's Old Town.
It was in response to a call that appeared to have come from beyond the towering
Khyber Pass, possibly from Afghanistan.
The call was automatically recorded on one of the computers in the
offices the MI6/CIA team share.
Just as automatically, it was dispatched down the line through
cyberspace to GCHQ, the British Government Headquarters in the Cotswold town of
Cheltenham.
Simultaneously it reached America's
NSA at Fort Meade, Md.
The words from Peshawar
were part of the trillions of words in 500 languages that the GCHQ/NSA super
computers are programmed to listen to, shift, reject or retain so they can be
analyzed by the thousands of experts both GCHQ and NSA employ.
By late last week, MI6 knew of al-Qaida's offer to purchase Polonium
210.
For more details on how polonium 210 could be smuggled into Great Britain and America, see the complete report in
Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, the US Web site World Daily
News reported.
O. Dmitriyev
KC
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