The Polonium Pixie

Much like Tinker Bell sprinkling magic fairie dust over Wendy and Michael, there appears to be one or more Russians spreading minute amounts of radioactive polonium in England. From Spiegel Online:

Andrei Lugovoi, 40, former KGB agent, currently a kind of mini magnate in the Russian soft drinks industry, is the man British investigators believe left an unmistakeable radiation trail across London.

He is now under quarantine in a Moscow hospital being treated for pixie dust contamination. It shouldn't have been that hard to find this guy, just follow the dead bodies and mutated squirrels. When he broke wind it must have been like Godzilla belch-blasting Tokyo.

Wherever the businessman appeared during his almost weekly visits to the capital of the United Kingdom, he left traces of radiation; in planes that brought him to Britain, in the hotels where he stayed, in restaurants and offices where he met contacts.

There is a reference in the article that:

The Geiger counters even buzzed in the brand new Emirates Stadium where he watched a dull draw between Arsenal London and ZSKA Moscow on that fateful Wednesday, November 1.

If you remember from my prior post, alpha particles can be stopped by a sheet of paper. They are only deadly when ingested. That he was emitting alpha particles indicates that the material probably had to be on the outside of his clothing. Or perhaps he was wearing the new Madame Curie line of men's cologne, eau' de Reactor.

With the subway bombings and all, you would think that the geiger counter activity would have had the bobbies all in a bother.

Scotland Yard's specialists have given clear hints that they regard Lugovoi as the main suspect, the man responsible for the trail of the murder weapon, the isotope polonium-210 [I fixed the typo] which points back to Moscow, where it's not exactly available on the open market -- only eight grams are exported a month.

There's a lot of blather in this article, so we'll cut to the chase. Alexander Litvinenko also met with an Italian wannabe mafioso, Mario Scaramella, on November 1:

The Italian has traces of polonium but the staff of the restaurant show no contamination. It's a different case with the waiters of the Pine Bar. All seven staff who worked that afternoon have tested positive for polonium.

The Pine Bar is a restaurant in the Millennium Hotel where Alexander Litvinenko met with the two other Russians: businessmen Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun.

Litvinenko is dead from radiation poisoning. The other two men are being treated in hospitals for radiation poisoning. Kovtun's car tested positive for polonium-210. Both men are also ex-KGB officers. And the Rooskies deny any part in it.

It just gets better and better. We'll be blogging about this for years.